Hillcrest Energy Technologies. (CSE: HEAT)
From concept to commercialization, Hillcrest is investing in the development of energy solutions that will power a more sustainable and electrified future.
Since General Electric Co. spun off GE Vernova Inc. (GEV) as a new standalone entity in April, the stock price of the company that combines GE Renewable Energy, GE Power and GE Digital has risen all the way up from $140 to $348.
Analysts at J.P. Morgan have just announced that they have raised their price target on GE Vernova from $330 to $356, maintaining an “overweight” rating.
The reason for the surge in GE Vernova’s stock price is that the company is uniquely positioned to address the triple challenges of energy reliability, affordability and sustainability. The company has been planning to deploy small modular reactors (SMRs) in the developed world and could be deployed globally as early as 2029.
GE Vernova aims to exceed $2 billion in annual revenue from its small reactor business by the mid-2030s.
It’s not just GE, in October, Alphabet and Amazon each announced major plans related to small modular reactors (SMRs), sparking widespread industry interest.
Data shows that the total power consumption of Amazon, Meta Platforms, Microsoft and Alphabet has soared by more than 80 per cent in the last three years alone. And this explosive growth is expected to continue. So, like GE Vernova, these tech giants have rediscovered nuclear power as an ideal source of energy.
In October, Amazon announced that its cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), would invest more than $500 million in nuclear energy.
AWS has signed an agreement with Dominion Energy Inc. (D), Virginia’s largest utility, to explore the development of SMRs in the vicinity of Dominion’s North Anna nuclear power plant, located at the midpoint between Washington, D.C., and Richmond.
Around the same time, Google announced an agreement with Kairos Power to build up to seven small modular reactors with a total capacity of up to 500 megawatts by 2035. The first reactor is expected to run by 2030.
Amazon Climate Commitment Fund has raised about $500 million in Series C-1 financing for X-energy, another SMR company. The investment is part of Amazon’s partnership with X-energy, which aims to put more than 5 gigawatts of new power projects in the U.S. by 2039, which would be the largest SMR commercial deployment goal announced to date.
In September, Microsoft and Constellation Energy signed a 20-year power purchase agreement, the ThreeMile deal, to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, which shut down in 2019, and sell all of its generation to Microsoft.
As technology continues to advance and policy continues to support it, investors can reasonably expect nuclear energy to play an increasingly important role in the clean energy transition for data centres. And that’s where the opportunity for profitability lies in.
