Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks appeared to be on her way to a historic Senate win Tuesday, with early returns giving her a comfortable lead over Larry Hogan, the popular former governor.

With 92% of the 1,958 precincts reporting at 11:20 p.m., Alsobrooks, a Democrat, had 1.2 million votes to 1.1 million for Hogan, a Republican, a 52% to 46% lead. Libertarian Mike Scott had 59,395 votes for 2% of the early total.

The vote capped a hard-fought, and occasionally bitter, race in which Alsobrooks looked to make history by becoming the first Black woman from Maryland — and one of a handful in U.S. history — to be elected to the Senate, while Hogan looked to recapture the magic that let the Republican be elected governor twice in a heavily Democratic state.

They were running to replace Sen. Ben Cardin (D), who sought not to seek reelection after 58 years in elected office. The apparent victory would make Alsobrooks the first woman senator from Maryland since Democratic Sen. Barbara Mikulksi, who stepped down in 2017; Hogan was seeking to become the first GOP senator from the state since Sen. Charles “Mac” Mathias left in 1987.

During a 20-minute victory speech before several hundred supporters at The Hotel at the University of Maryland in College Park, Alsobrooks said Marylanders proved to be “absolutely amazing people” during her campaigning across the state.

“From the bottom of my heart, I thank each and every Marylander. To serve this state, my hometown [of Prince George’s County] is the honor of a lifetime,” she said. “I had the great honor of traveling all across this state to meet Marylanders where they love, where they worship, where they build businesses, where they educate their children and where they dream of a better day.”

Alsobrooks also pledged to work with Marylanders who didn’t vote for her or who didn’t vote.

“I will never stop working to prove that public service, that the work we do, can and must change the lives of people for the better,” she told her supporters.

The enthusiastic crowd, some sporting black-and-lime-green Alsobrooks for Senate T-shirts, cheered, clapped and yelled her name throughout the speech. Many were like Wanda Durant, a community activist in Prince George’s and the mother of NBA superstar Kevin Durant.

“It is an exciting opportunity for the state of Maryland to have a Black woman, in particular, Angela Alsobrooks. She is intelligent. She is a person who is a lover of the people. She does not see her own interest,” Durant said a few minutes after Alsobrooks’ speech. “She has proven time and time again that Maryland does matter to her.”

Hogan supporters gathered in Annapolis clinging to hope that the state’s two-term Republican governor — an acknowledged underdog in the Senate race — could pull off an improbable win. Delays in releasing initial  early and mail-in voting tallies briefly kept that hope alive, but by 9:30 p.m., the race was called for Alsobrooks.

“Tonight did not bring the outcome we had hoped for,” Hogan told the crowd, before striking a conciliatory tone.

“In our nation’s history, only three African American women have ever served in the United States Senate. Tonight, regardless of who you voted for, we can all take pride in the election of the first Black woman to represent Maryland,” Hogan said. “Now is the time for us to come together and to move forward as one state and one nation, to respect the will of the voters and the outcome of the democratic process.”

He called on supporters to work together with Democrats to fix a broken political system, and to hear “the voices of the exhausted majority” rather than defer to “the demands of the loudest and angriest few who seem hell-bent on tearing America apart.”

“From day one, this was the only campaign in America that reached out to Republicans, Democrats and independents alike, because that’s what it’s going to take to solve the serious problems we face,” he said, echoing a theme of his campaign.

“We need to stop dismissing or even hating those we disagree with. We have got to find a way to listen and to believe in each other once again, because there really is far more that unites us,” Hogan said.

The race attracted tens of millions of dollars in outside campaign funding, unusual for Maryland where Republicans are typically given little chance in statewide races. But Hogan’s history of being elected statewide, and leaving office in 2022 with high popularity ratings, put the state in play.

The themes were set early in the race and repeated often, with partisanship being a key Alsobrooks’ campaign attack line against Hogan, who was recruited at the last minute by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to enter the Senate race. Democrats currently hold a one-seat edge in the Senate but are likely to lose control of the chamber in this fall’s elections, a point hammered by Alsobrooks.

Democrats also made abortion rights a central element of their campaign at a time when states — including Maryland — are struggling with abortion rights and restrictions after the Supreme Court in 2022 overturned Roe v. Wade, the nearly 50-year-old case that recognized a right to an abortion. Alsobrooks campaign pointed to Hogan’s history of abortion opposition and his veto of some abortion-rights legislation as governor, and they tried to tie him to former President Donald Trump, who has boasted about appointing three of the six Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe.

The Maryland Democratic Party flooded email inboxes almost daily with two main messages: A vote for Hogan means Republicans control the Senate, which could lead to “extreme” policies, such as a push on a national abortion ban.

That message gave pause to voters like Naekasah Johnson of Prince George’s County, a first-grade math and science teacher who said Tuesday that she voted for Alsobrooks because she was worried about Republican control of the Senate. “Sometimes he [Hogan] could say one thing and then could possibly do something else,” Johnson said.

Hogan pushed back forcefully, against both the abortion rights charges and the claims that he would be a partisan in the Senate.

He said during the one-and-only televised debate with Alsobrooks last month that he would support codifying the protections of Roe v. Wade nationwide, despite being personally anti-abortion. He accused Democrats of mispresenting his record.

Even though he ran as a Republican, Hogan also insisted that he would be in independent voice in the Senate, able to work across party lines as he said he did as governor. Hogan, long a critic of Trump, tried to distance himself from the former president, whom he briefly considered challenging for the presidential nomination in 2020.

In a phone call with reporters Tuesday afternoon, campaign aides complained about what they called false and misleading advertising directed at Hogan, as well as “really dishonest ads” they said misrepresented Hogan’s position on abortion.

“We’re still optimistic and we think that this is going to be a very close race and a long night,” said David Weinman, Hogan’s campaign manager, said Tuesday afternoon.

About $27 million came into the campaign in support of Hogan from Maryland’s Future PAC, with at least $11 million spent mostly on TV and radio ads and mailers that attacked Alsobrooks.

The ads highlighted Alsobrooks’ failure to pay all the property taxes on homes she owned, one of which she rented even though it was listed as her primary residence at the time. Alsobrooks chalked it up to simple mistakes in filing her taxes, and quickly worked with officials in the District of Columbia and Prince George’s County to pay the back taxes.

Democrats responded with a series of attacks on Hogan for land deals the state made while he was governor that benefited his real estate company — deals Hogan and supporters insisted were proper and vetted by state ethics officials.

Hogan also questioned Alsobrooks’ effectiveness as Prince George’s County executive and, before that, as the state’s attorney, claiming crime rose under her watch. But it’s unclear how much impact those charges had.

Pollsters suggested that Hogan’s previous magic touch, that allowed him to attract large shares of Democratic and independent voters, was not enough to overcome Maryland voters’ dislike for Trump, who was beaten soundly in unofficial Maryland returns Tuesday by Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee.

Hogan’s campaign predicted — consistent with that early polling — that he would attract more votes overall than the top of the Republican ticket in Maryland, but that the popular Republican former governor still faced an uphill battle in a “presidential election year in a state not inclined to vote Republican.”

The election puts Alsobrooks on track to become the first Black woman elected to the Senate from Maryland, and the first woman since Mikulski, who was the first woman to hold the office from Maryland.

Former Gov. Larry Hogan (R) and Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks (D) stuck relentlessly to their messages Thursday during what is likely to be the lone televised debate of the Maryland Senate election — and each frequently accused the other of misrepresenting their records.

The debate, taped in the afternoon at the studios of Maryland Public Television, was scheduled to air on several area TV stations and other media outlets Thursday evening.

The hourlong telecast perfectly framed the state of the race and the candidates’ desire to define it. Hogan insisted that he can be the same kind of independent operator and seeker of political common ground on Capitol Hill that he was as governor, a posture that produced record high approval ratings for most of his eight-year tenure in a very Democratic state.

“We’re going to hear a lot about Democrat vs. Republican, red vs. blue. All I really care about is the red, white and blue,” he said. “Sending more partisans to Washington is not going to help.”

Hogan said he is running to replace retiring Sen. Ben Cardin (D) because he wants to end partisan divisiveness in Washington, D.C., and added: “I’m trying to put people over politics and country over party.”

But Alsobrooks frequently asserted that in a narrowly divided Senate, with most Republicans in thrall to former President Donald Trump, party labels should matter to Maryland voters, regardless of what they might think about Hogan and his time as governor.

Alsobrooks regularly name-checked Trump, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), and other Republican senators like Lindsey Graham (S.C.), Ted Cruz (Texas) and Rick Scott (Fla.). She said that if Hogan was so intent on distancing himself from the GOP, he should have run for Senate as an independent.

“He gladly put on the [Republican] jersey,” she said. “When Mitch McConnell called him [to run for Senate], he gladly got into the game.”

Alsobrooks also faulted Hogan for writing in candidates in the past two White House elections and saying he planned to again this year.

On issues ranging from foreign policy to the federal workforce to the future of the U.S. Supreme Court, Alsobrooks sought to define Hogan by the national Republican agenda and the consequences of turning the Senate over to the GOP. But nowhere did she try to delineate the differences between her and Hogan — and his fellow Republicans — more forcefully than on the issue of abortion.

Throughout most of his political career, Hogan has described himself as personally pro-life. But shortly after he entered the Senate race this year, he began identifying as “pro-choice,” and pledged to support legislation restoring the abortion rights protections that were in place under Roe v. Wade, before the Supreme Court overturned that ruling with its Dobbs decision in 2022.

Alsobrooks suggested early in the debate that Hogan’s personal pledges are irrelevant.

“If the Republicans have the majority in the Senate, there will be no vote on Roe,” she said. “He will empower a caucus” that is determined to impose further abortion restrictions.

Hogan replied that he would attempt to sway Republican colleagues on the abortion issue and others.

“Sometimes one voice standing up can really make a difference,” he said.

Alsobrooks also hit Hogan for vetoing legislation in 2022 to expand the number of medical professionals who can perform abortions — Democrats in the legislature overrode the veto — and for delaying state funding for a corresponding training program after the bill became law.

“There’s no way to make that up,” she said to reporters after the debate. “He withheld funding for abortion care legislation. It’s an undisputed fact.”

Hogan said he vetoed the measure because it allows “non-licensed professionals” such as midwives to perform the procedure.

“A lot of people in the medical community agreed with me,” he said.

Hogan said that in attacking his record on abortion, Alsobrooks was saying “multiple things that are not true.”

“For you to lie about something as important as this issue is insulting,” he said.

With a ballot question to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution favored by 69% of Maryland voters, according to a recent poll, Alsobrooks and her supporters believe reproductive rights is a winning issue for her, and they have raised the issue continually throughout the campaign. But Hogan tried to parry the attacks Thursday, arguing that Alsobrooks’ attempts to tie him to anti-abortion Republicans amounted to the kind of blind partisanship that voters disdain.

“We’re going to hear a lot about this talk all night, because that’s the way they talk in Washington,” he said.

Alsobrooks described the Supreme Court as “awful” and said she would support attempts to reform the court, through term limits, an expansion in the number of justices, and ethics reforms.

“They no longer support the will of the people,” she said.

Alsobrooks also dredged up quotes Hogan made praising Supreme Court justices, which she said came after the Dobbs decision. But Hogan said he was referring specifically to a high court decision on funding for Jewish schools.

Hogan lamented that Supreme Court nominees rarely get bipartisan support anymore, and contrasted that reality at the federal level to his own success appointing judges in the state — including six of the seven current judges of the state Supreme Court (then known as the Maryland Court of Appeals), who were confirmed unanimously. Hogan has said that if he’s elected to the Senate, he will only support nominees from the White House who are able to win bipartisan support.

“If there’s one thing we should not be politicizing, it’s the Supreme Court,” he said.

Asked by NBC’s Chuck Todd, who served as debate moderator, whether he would have supported Trump’s three nominees to the Supreme Court, Hogan replied, “I wasn’t there and I don’t know how I would vote.”

Foreign policy

Foreign policy played a small but significant part of the candidate debate. One of the panelists, Deborah Weiner, an anchor on WBAL-TV, noted that Cardin is a strong supporter of Israel, while U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D) has been critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, calling for an immediate cease fire in Gaza and return of all the hostages being held by Hamas. She asked Alsobrooks whether she’d be more like Cardin or Van Hollen if elected.

“I’m neither, I’m Angela Alsobrooks,” she said, adding, “We have an obligation to get those hostages home and work on negotiations that will lead to a cease fire.”

Hogan called himself a strong supporter of Israel and criticized Alsobrooks for embracing support from Van Hollen, who he called “probably the most anti-Israel member of the United States Senate.”

Alsobrooks hit back: “Sen. Cardin, who is supporting me, says he is ashamed of the way Gov. Hogan is politicizing this issue.”

Asked whether they would support sending U.S. troops to Taiwan as that country fends off aggression from China, Alsobrooks said no. Hogan replied, “Hopefully, it won’t come to that.” Hogan said he decided to run for Senate after congressional Republicans “tanked” a deal that would have provided extra aide to Taiwan, Ukraine and stronger security measures at the U.S. border.

Alsobrooks again sought to link Hogan to the national GOP on foreign affairs.

“The problem the governor is going to have is his party doesn’t believe in these alliances” that the U.S. has traditionally had with other foreign governments.

The personal troubles

During the debate, Alsobrooks was asked by WRC-TV reporter Tracee Wilkins about reports that she improperly claimed tax credits on two properties she owned, one in Prince George’s County, the other in Washington. Alsobrooks said the mistake was inadvertent and that she was scrambling to make amends.

“I always pay my taxes — always,” she said.

After the debate, she told reporters that she had already paid back the principal she owed for improperly claiming the tax breaks and was working to repay the interest.

Asked why the revelation about Alsobrooks should matter to voters, Hogan conceded, “I’m not sure it should matter to voters.”

While his campaign has only made occasional references to the Alsobrooks tax flap since it was first reported by CNN, a super PAC called Maryland’s Future, which supports Hogan, has already spent millions of dollars attacking Alsobrooks over the matter with TV and radio ads.

Neither candidate was asked Thursday about a new report in Time magazine that said the Maryland Board of Public Works, which Hogan presided over as governor, on several occasions awarded lucrative state housing contracts to clients of Hogan’s real estate firm. The report said that almost 40% of all competitive affordable housing contracts granted during Hogan’s tenure went to companies represented by his firm, which his brother took over when Hogan became governor.

Democrats seized on the report, suggesting that Hogan, at a minimum, had violated state ethics laws by not disclosing the conflict of interest or recusing himself during these Board of Public Works votes.

“All of this creates many questions, questions that Gov. Hogan needs to answer,” former state Attorney General Brian Frosh (D) said on a call Thursday organized by the Maryland Democratic Party.

Speaking to reporters after the debate, Hogan dismissed the Time article as “completely false.”

“I just saw it as I was walking into the debate,” he said. “This is what’s called an October surprise.”

By Josh Kurtz and William J. Ford

Spy readers are encouraged to participate in one of several unscientific survey questions as the Mid-Shore prepares for Election Day 2024 this November. First up, tell us who you would vote for in the highly competitive Senate race between former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan and current County Executive of Prince George’s County Angela Alsobrook.

Click HERE to take the survey.

Last night, the Avalon Foundation and the Talbot Spy co-hosted a Town Hall meeting for four of the six candidates running for the Talbot County Board of Education.

Spy Columnist Craig Fuller served as moderator and engaged the candidates in a series of questions about public education in Talbot County. We encourage our readers to watch the evening’s program.

The Avalon has created a helpful voter guide for residents to help determine their district and candidates. Watch below.

This video is approximately 120 minutes in length.

The Avalon Foundation and the Talbot Spy have announced that the two organizations will collaborate once again on a community Town Hall meeting, this time for candidates running for the Talbot County Board of Education. The meeting will be held Tonight, October 2, at 6 p.m. at the Avalon main theatre to discuss the educational issues facing our community.

Spy Columnist Craig Fuller has agreed to host the evening’s program. Mr. Fuller has lived in Talbot County for the last seven years. Before his arrival, he served four years in the White House as assistant to President Reagan for Cabinet Affairs, followed by four years as chief of staff to Vice President George H.W. Bush. He later was the CEO of public affairs firms and associations in Washington, D.C., before his retirement.

The program is anticipated to last 120 minutes. It will be live-streamed on the Mid-Shore Community Television YouTube channel and the Avalon Facebook page. Attendance at the Avalon will be on a first-come basis, and there will be no charge for admission. Donations, however, are welcome to support the cost of this event and future community programming.

The Avalon has created a helpful voter guide for residents to help determine their district and candidates. Watch below.

The Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant Units 1 and 2 are located near Lusby and licensed for at least the next decacde. Photo by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

As Maryland officials scramble to meet the state’s ambitious clean energy mandates, they are coalescing around a concept that seemed unthinkable a decade ago: That nuclear energy must be part of the solution.

Even environmentalists are coming to terms with the idea.

Paul Pinsky, the director of the Maryland Energy Administration, and one of the leading climate advocates in Annapolis during his long tenure in the General Assembly, recalled protesting against nuclear power plants in the 1970s. Now, he says, nuclear has “become a staple” in the state and nation’s energy portfolio, even if many Americans don’t realize it.

“If you asked 100 people on the street if their lights came on because of nuclear energy, I would guess three people would know it,” Pinsky said.

The Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant in Southern Maryland, which opened in 1975, generates about 40% of the energy produced in Maryland — all of it carbon-free. More than 80% of the clean energy generated in the state comes from the nuclear plant.

But nuclear continues to be hamstrung by a reputation, gained largely after high-profile disasters at power plants in the 1970s and 1980s, that it’s dangerous. The nuclear industry has also been struggling financially: Several nuclear power plants across the country have been decommissioned over the past few decades, in part because more natural gas power is being generated in the U.S. than ever before, which is far cheaper to produce.

Yet clean energy mandates have prompted policymakers to take another look at nuclear, knowing that whatever progress is being made developing other clean energy sources is inadequate for meeting short- and medium-term goals. In Maryland, the 2022 Climate Solutions Now legislation, which Pinsky co-sponsored, requires the state to create a 100% clean energy standard by 2035, while reaching zero carbon emissions by 2045.

For the past few years, stakeholders in Maryland’s nuclear industry have been angling for greater recognition — and possibly financial incentives — from state authorities, and they soon may get their wish.

“We appreciate the fact that we’re hearing people talk about recognizing nuclear in the state’s clean energy program,” said Mason Emnett, director of public policy at Constellation Energy, which owns and operates Calvert Cliffs.

But four months before the kick-off of the 2025 General Assembly session, it isn’t clear yet if there will be concrete legislative action to bolster nuclear.

“We’re not exactly sure what to expect from the upcoming legislative session,” Emnett said. And at this stage, the industry does not appear to have a specific ask.

The leaders of the two relevant legislative committees in Annapolis, Senate Education, Energy and Environment Chair Brian J. Feldman (D-Montgomery) and House Economic Matters Chair C.T. Wilson (D-Charles), are both supportive of nuclear in the broadest sense. But neither seems ready just yet to advance or embrace specific legislation.

“There is a lot of discussion about how do we get to 100% clean energy by 2035 without nuclear being part of the picture?” Feldman said in a recent interview. He predicted that legislation would emerge in the next session addressing how to bolster clean energy production in Maryland.

Wilson said he expects legislation to be introduced “incentivizing new nuclear deals,” similar to measures from recent sessions that have attempted to bolster solar energy installations and offshore wind production in Maryland. He added that because it takes so long to develop new nuclear facilities, the state needs to act quickly to produce results that may not be realized for several years.

“It may be a very viable opportunity, but it’s way out in the future,” Wilson said in an interview. “It would be nice to start stimulating something.”

One possible legislative solution would be to include nuclear energy in the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS), which provides financial credits, known as RECs, for producers or suppliers of certain clean energy sources.

Every year in Annapolis, bills are introduced to tweak the RPS, usually to add a clean energy source to the standard or to eliminate one that’s considered dirty — or to change the complicated tiered system for calculating financial credits. But they rarely get very far, in part because they are complicated and cumbersome and are lobbied heavily by powerful interests that stand to gain or lose from the legislation.

For 2025, Del. Lorig Charkoudian (D-Montgomery), one of the leading environmentalists in the legislature and the top energy policy wonk, is contemplating legislation that would eliminate the RPS altogether and replace it with a system that would provide new and different types of incentives for clean energy producers. Charkoudian said the current RPS is flawed because it focuses on arcane compliance numbers without incentivizing clean energy production.

“We know we need to build energy generation in Maryland, and any generation we build in 2024 and beyond has to be clean,” she said. “That’s why we need to restructure our clean energy compliance. We need to do something that begins to address resource adequacy.”

Charkoudian said any new system for incentivizing clean energy production would have to include nuclear, to ensure that Calvert Cliffs, the state’s only nuclear plant, stays open for the foreseeable future. The two reactors at the nuclear plant along the Chesapeake Bay in Lusby are licensed to operate through 2034 and 2036, respectively, and Constellation will begin the application process for renewing their licenses through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission late this decade.

Beyond Charkoudian’s proposed legislation, which is still being developed, “there’s going to be a large conversation [during the 2025 session] about our Renewable Portfolio Standard,” Feldman predicted.

Charkoudian said she expects some of her colleagues to advance nuclear bills in the upcoming session.

“I think there’s a range of thoughts about what they should be,” she said.

An economic challenge

The federal government, through the Inflation Reduction Act, currently has an incentive providing tax credits for nuclear energy production that lasts through 2032. Whether a dysfunctional Congress can extend it when it nears its expiration is very much an open question. But that credit, and any incentives for nuclear that the state can provide, will help to ensure Constellation’s robust investment in the Calvert Cliffs plant.

“The economics of nuclear continue to be a challenge,” Feldman said.

The Maryland Energy Administration is finalizing a rough draft of a report that will detail recommendations for how the state can meet is clean energy goals by 2035, and nuclear will inevitably part of the mix. A final report could be released by the end of the year.

Whether the report serves as a template for legislative action for Gov. Wes Moore’s administration remains to be seen.

“Alongside the state legislature and other stakeholders, the Moore-Miller Administration is continuing to explore all available options, including nuclear energy, to help to meet Maryland’s environmental and energy goals,” Carter Elliot IV, a spokesperson for Moore (D), said in an email. “The governor looks forward to supporting legislation and initiatives that will help Maryland secure its clean energy future.”

Late last year, between Christmas and New Year’s Day, the Maryland Department of the Environment released a meaty document outlining what the state needs to do meet its lofty climate mandates. Price tag: A minimum of $10 billion. State policymakers are still struggling to come up with ways to pay for the recommendations, at a time when the state is anticipating significant revenue shortfalls.

It’s possible that any report on clean energy strategies for Maryland could also involve robust government investment — a significant stumbling block to the state’s ambitions.

But nuclear advocates are increasingly optimistic about the commercial and operational prospects of a new technology known as small modular reactors, which can be located at far smaller sites than a full-scale nuclear plant operation. The federal government is pouring billions of dollars into research for the technology, and one of the beneficiaries is X-Energy Reactor Co. LLC, a company located in Rockville, just down the road from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission headquarters.

Yet even the most optimistic proponents of small modular reactors believe it will be a minimum of seven years before any of those facilities are operational and supplying power to the electric grid. And Charkoudian believes that unlike existing technologies that haven’t been fully adopted yet in the U.S., it is especially difficult to ask taxpayers and utility ratepayers to make investments in these facilities because they aren’t visible anywhere yet.

“It’s just not commercially available,” she said. “At least you can see that offshore wind exists in Europe. There’s no question about whether they’re viable.”

Data points

Any conversation about the need to generate more clean energy — and more energy altogether — cannot take place without discussing the likelihood that energy-consuming data centers are coming to Maryland. Even without data centers, Maryland needs more energy generation and transmission. With them, the need expands exponentially.

“Data centers are like a huge tick that you put on our grid, and wherever you put it, they can start sucking that energy out,” said Wilson, the House Economic Matters chair.

Already there is controversy over a proposed transmission line project that would run through three Maryland counties on its way to data centers in Northern Virginia. And while a big data center hub is in the early stages of development in Frederick County, some big technology companies are now eyeing the Calvert Cliffs nuclear property as a possible location for a data center.

During this year’s legislative session, as lawmakers debated a measure to restructure the electricity market in Maryland, the House attempted to insert an amendment that dealt with the complicated topic of onsite electricity generation and how electric suppliers interact with their largest commercial customers. It would have effectively prevented Constellation from building a data center on the Calvert Cliffs property.

The amendment was dropped on the final day of the legislative session after House-Senate negotiations, but Constellation continues to talk to tech companies about a data center at Calvert Cliffs. It isn’t a widespread practice in the industry yet, but it’s likely to become one: Talen Energy Corp., which operates the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station nuclear plant in Berwick, Pa., generates electricity for an adjacent data center, which it sold earlier this year to Amazon Web Services.

And Constellation announced Friday that it had reached an agreement with Microsoft to reopen the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania – site of the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, in 1979 – to help power Microsoft’s data centers. Under the agreement, the plant, which was mothballed in 2019, could reopen as soon as 2028.

“It makes perfect sense to place a data center adjacent to your power providing center,” said Del. Mark N. Fisher (R-Calvert), whose district includes the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant. “The closer you are to the power supply, the more secure your data center is.”

But that potential development has also sparked a debate about whether a data center next to a nuclear site would effectively be siphoning off a significant portion of power that’s meant to go on the electric grid.

“We’ve been telling our customers that [nuclear plants] are there for the grid, but now we’re taking them off the grid,” said Vincent Duane, a principal at Copper Monarch LLC, an electricity markets and cybersecurity consulting firm. He spoke at a conference on data centers last month sponsored by the Maryland Tech Council.

Nuclear advocates counter that the electricity is going to be consumed anyway, regardless of whether the data center is near a power plant or not. Setting up a data center that feeds directly off a power plant will reduce the need for expensive electric transmission updates, they argue, and income that the nuclear company takes in from a data center could prompt more investments and more efficient power generation at the nuclear plant.

“You have a question of configuration — how do you plug it in?” said Emnett, the Constellation executive. “Do you plug it in to the generator or do you plug it in to the grid?”

That’s one of many questions that Maryland policymakers and regulators will have to consider as they contemplate the possible expansion of nuclear energy in the state.

By Josh Kurtz

For Mid-Shore residents who frequently use Route 301 to commute or for doctor appointments in Easton, it should come as some minor relief to know that drivers were not just imagining more traffic on that significant North-South highway. It’s a fact.

According to Queen Anne’s County’s public facilities planner, Steve Cohoon, the percentage of traffic growth since 2018, when the Middletown by-pass opened, has grown by 31%.  He shared that number with QAC Commissioners last night at their regular meeting, as well as data suggesting another wave of increased use caused by the collapse of the Key Bridge.

The Spy, thanks to QACTV, shares Cohoon’s report and selective comments from the Commissioners about the ongoing safety concerns as Route 301 continues to see car traffic increase.

This video is approximately nine minutes in length.