October 08, 2024 09:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time
WASHINGTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Blue Energy, a nuclear power plant company, emerged from stealth today with a $45 million Series A fundraise co-led by Engine Ventures and At One Ventures, with investment from Angular Ventures, Tamarack Global, Propeller Ventures, Starlight Ventures, and Nucleation Capital. Today Blue Energy also introduced its modular nuclear power plant that can be centrally manufactured in existing shipyards. Shipyard manufacturing reduces the cost and build time of deploying nuclear power safely, making nuclear power economically competitive with fossil fuels and renewables. The funding will be used to advance Blue Energy’s core engineering work and site development, and secure additional partners.
The AI datacenter and manufacturing boom has emphasized the demand for reliable, clean electricity in the U.S. and the world. To decarbonize and grow electricity production while maintaining energy affordability and security, the global energy generation mix must include more nuclear power. However, new nuclear plant construction projects face multi-year delays and exorbitant costs. While there have been exciting advancements in nuclear reactor technology, reactors make up less than 10% of the cost of nuclear power plants; over 90% of the cost comes from construction and regulatory challenges in the rest of the plant. Blue Energy’s innovation is a modular, reactor-agnostic power plant architecture to house the next generation of nuclear reactors. Blue Energy’s power plants use centralized shipyard manufacturing to dramatically reduce the capital costs from $10K/kW to $2K/kW and shrink build times from 10 years to 2 years.
“Blue Energy is addressing the biggest obstacles to wide adoption of nuclear power: cost and build time. Using the traditional approach, it takes thousands of workers several years to construct nuclear power plants on site. We’ve designed a modular plant that can be fully prefabricated centrally in shipyards and transported to its operating location,” said Jake Jurewicz, CEO of Blue Energy. “By moving nuclear power to preexisting assembly lines, Blue Energy is radically reducing build time and cost, making nuclear power cost competitive with fossil fuels and renewables.”
Blue Energy is reactor agnostic, partnering with reactor vendors and designing modular power plants to house them. By partnering with reactor vendors, Blue Energy can leverage existing regulatory progress to further accelerate the time to market for their modular nuclear power plant.
“The key challenge to expanding nuclear capacity over the last two decades has been one of cost, driven by on-site construction overhead and the long pre-revenue build times,” said Michael Kearney, General Partner at the Engine Ventures and Blue Energy board member. “By integrating with established reactor vendors, and existing centralized manufacturing techniques, the Blue Energy development platform unlocks low-cost economics that can rapidly scale to serve the growing demand for clean, firm power.”
“Decarbonized baseload is essential for a decarbonized grid and helps to address the capacity factor issues of solar and wind. Blue Energy addresses the core of rising nuclear costs by dramatically simplifying the regulatory and operational path while making use of the ready-to-scale reactor technologies,” added Tom Chi, General Partner at At One Ventures and Blue Energy board member. “The result will be impactful for addressing grid demand, optimizing our renewables capacity, and providing high-reliability power to industry and to consumers.”
Blue Energy was founded by Jake Jurewicz and Matt Slotkin. Jurewicz previously co-founded Entropy Power and served on the corporate strategy team at Exelon Corporation. He holds a Masters in Nuclear Science & Engineering, and a dual Bachelors in Physics and Nuclear Science & Engineering from MIT, where he did his thesis on shipyard construction of offshore nuclear power plants. Slotkin previously co-founded Vowel, an AI/video company acquired by Zapier, and led engineering in the Systemized Intelligence Lab at Bridgewater Associates. Blue Energy’s leadership team also includes Chief Commercial Officer and Corporate Counsel Tom O’Neill, the former General Counsel and Vice President of Licensing at Exelon. CJ Fong, formerly Chief of Staff to NRC Commissioner Wright and NRC staff for 23 years, joins Blue Energy as VP of Regulatory. Charlie Bowser, who engineered, built and commissioned the NETPower pilot plant, joins as SVP of Engineering.
Blue Energy has signed a letter of intent with a datacenter and cloud provider to serve as the offtaker for the first plant. For more information on Blue Energy, including partnership opportunities and open positions on its DC and Edinburgh-based teams, visit: https://blueenergy.co/.
About Blue Energy
Founded in 2023, Blue Energy builds modular nuclear power plants in shipyards, reducing construction time by 80%. The company’s plant design is reactor agnostic and can quickly deploy affordable, zero-emissions baseload electricity at a price that is competitive with fossil fuels and renewables. Blue Energy stems from MIT’s Nuclear Science & Engineering Department and is backed by The Engine Ventures and At One Ventures. For more information, visit https://www.blueenergy.co/ or follow the company on LinkedIn.
Contacts
Kerry Walker
[email protected]