Prairie Island Plant Maintenance

Workers at Xcel Energy’s Prairie Island Nuclear Plant began a weeks-long refueling and maintenance effort recently, allowing the facility to continue providing reliable, carbon-free energy for more than one million customers throughout the Upper Midwest and remain an economic engine for the region.

During the refueling, nearly 500 specialists join the plant’s full-time workforce.

This provides a significant boost to the economies of Goodhue County and the surrounding region.

The work helps set up the plant for a future extension of its operations, which will play an important part in achieving Minnesota’s clean energy goals.

Refueling happens every two years for each of the two units at Prairie Island.

While Prairie Island’s Unit 2 is out of service, refueling and plant maintenance will improve equipment and plant reliability and help ensure that the plant continues to provide safe, clean and reliable power to the region.

During this outage, Unit 1 will continue operations to provide electricity to customers. 

Together, Prairie Island and Xcel Energy’s nuclear plant at Monticello provide 23% of the total electricity that the company’s customers use in the Upper Midwest.