Constellation Energy trades like a growth stock because Washington decided existing nuclear plants are a national asset worth subsidizing and protecting. The mechanism isn't exotic: Section 45U of the Inflation Reduction Act pays roughly 0.3 cents/kWh (up to ~1.5 cents with prevailing-wage compliance) to owners of existing reactors whenever wholesale power prices dip, putting a federal floor under fleet economics that used to swing with merchant power prices alone. Layer on top the DOE Loan Programs Office's $1 billion loan — closed in November 2025 under the Energy Dominance Financing Program — to help fund the roughly $1.6 billion restart of Unit 1 at Three Mile Island, rebranded the Crane Clean Energy Center, and you have a utility whose cash flows are now substantially government-underwritten. Add a 20-year power purchase agreement with Microsoft for the plant's 835 MW of output, and CEG's re-rating stops being a story about AI electricity demand and becomes a story about tax credits, federal credit support, and a hyperscaler locking in policy-protected baseload for a data center buildout. Pull any one of those three levers out and the multiple compresses.
Who cashes in: