Talen Energy Corporation is an independent power producer headquartered in Houston, Texas, with approximately 13.1 GW of generation concentrated in the PJM Interconnection. Talen describes its fleet as dispatchable nuclear-plus-gas capacity aimed at power demand from AI and data-center growth. Its anchor asset is the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station, a two-unit nuclear plant in northeastern Pennsylvania that Talen owns 90% and operates, and that supplies roughly half of the company's annual generation.
Talen was formed in 2015 when PPL Corporation spun off its competitive generation business and combined it with Riverstone Holdings' generation assets. Riverstone took the company fully private in December 2016. Talen filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May 2022 after hedging losses drained its liquidity, emerged in May 2023 with about $2.2 billion less debt, and relisted on the NASDAQ Global Select Market under the ticker TLN on July 10, 2024. The stock has risen sharply since: from a relisting reference price of about $127.50 to roughly $386 on May 28, 2026, an approximately threefold increase, with a market capitalization near $17.7 billion.
Two strategic pillars define the company today. The first is a 17-year power purchase agreement with Amazon for up to 1,920 MW of Susquehanna output, the first grid-connected nuclear PPA of its scale tied to a hyperscaler. The second is a debt-funded series of acquisitions of combined-cycle gas plants in PJM and adjacent markets: the Freedom and Guernsey stations, which closed in November 2025, and the pending Cornerstone deal announced in January 2026.
Talen operates approximately 13.1 GW of capacity after the Freedom and Guernsey acquisitions closed in November 2025, up from about 10.7 GW before them. (One November 2025 completion release cited approximately 13.2 GW; Talen's FY2025 results and portfolio page use 13.1 GW.) The fleet sits mostly in PJM and mixes nuclear, natural gas, and a shrinking coal footprint.
Susquehanna sits in Salem Township, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, and runs two General Electric boiling-water reactors. Unit 1 entered commercial operation in June 1983 and Unit 2 in February 1985; their NRC operating licenses run through 2042 and 2044. Talen owns 90% of the plant through Susquehanna Nuclear, LLC and operates it; Allegheny Electric Cooperative holds the remaining 10%. Gross plant capacity is about 2.5 GW across the two units. Talen's net economic share, reflecting its 90% ownership, is roughly 2.2 GW, the figure that appears in its financial disclosures. Susquehanna generates approximately 18 to 20 TWh per year and accounts for roughly half of Talen's total annual generation, both approximate figures. Talen has described the plant as producing in 2024 at an all-in cost of less than $24/MWh. It is the company's anchor asset and the basis of the Amazon power purchase agreement.
Talen's natural gas fleet centers on plants in Pennsylvania and Ohio. The legacy gas assets include Montour (1,505 MW, which Talen has converted off coal), Martins Creek (1,710 MW), and Lower Mount Bethel (607 MW), all in Pennsylvania and wholly owned. The 2025 acquisitions added two combined-cycle gas turbine (CCGT) stations: Freedom in Pennsylvania (1,049 MW) and Guernsey in Ohio (1,771 MW). Talen describes this CCGT capacity as dispatchable supply for hyperscale data centers and large commercial and industrial customers in PJM, alongside the carbon-free output from Susquehanna.
Talen has stated an intent to eliminate coal from its wholly-owned facilities. Brunner Island committed to stop burning coal by the end of 2028, and Montour has been converted off coal. The company also holds minority stakes in the Conemaugh (22%), Keystone (12%), and Colstrip (30% of Unit 3) coal plants. Its two Maryland units, Brandon Shores (coal) and H.A. Wagner (oil, gas co-fired), operate under a reliability-must-run (RMR) settlement reached in January 2025 that runs through May 31, 2029, or until transmission upgrades are in service. Beginning June 1, 2025, Talen expects roughly $145 million per year for Brandon Shores and roughly $35 million per year for H.A. Wagner under the arrangement, plus performance incentives. That RMR revenue is time-limited and tied to the transmission build-out timeline.
In March 2024, Talen sold its 960 MW Cumulus data-center campus in Berwick, Pennsylvania, next to Susquehanna, to Amazon Web Services for $650 million: about $350 million at close plus roughly $300 million escrowed against development milestones. The 960 MW was the campus design capacity. As part of the deal, Talen agreed to supply AWS under a co-located, behind-the-meter (BTM) power purchase agreement from Susquehanna. The initial approved co-located electrical load was 300 MW, with a contractual path to step up in 120 MW increments and a one-time option to cap at 480 MW.
On November 1, 2024, FERC voted 2-1 to reject the amended interconnection service agreement (ISA) that PJM had submitted for the arrangement. The amendment would have raised the co-located load from 300 MW toward a ceiling of 960 MW (a load figure distinct from the Cumulus campus design capacity). Commissioners Mark Christie and Lindsay See voted to reject; Chairman Willie Phillips dissented, calling the arrangement a first-of-its-kind structure that warranted flexibility. The majority found that PJM had not shown the deviations from standard interconnection terms were necessary. American Electric Power and Exelon had protested, arguing the structure could shift roughly $140 million per year in transmission costs onto other PJM ratepayers. The order became the leading FERC precedent on co-locating large data-center load directly with generation, and it created industry-wide uncertainty about the behind-the-meter co-location model.
On June 11, 2025, Talen and Amazon restructured the relationship into a front-of-the-meter (FOTM), grid-connected PPA. Because it is grid-connected, the FOTM structure does not require the FERC ISA approval that the November 2024 order denied: PPL Electric Utilities handles transmission and delivery, and Talen is the retail power supplier. The agreement covers up to 1,920 MW of Susquehanna output, runs 17 years through 2042, and carries an expected total value of approximately $18 billion, with annual revenue of up to roughly $1.4 billion once fully ramped. Volumes ramp to 840 to 1,200 MW by 2029 and 1,680 to 1,920 MW by 2032. Talen and Amazon also agreed to explore building small modular reactors (SMRs) in Talen's Pennsylvania footprint and to pursue Susquehanna uprates that would add net-new output to PJM.
Talen reaffirmed the 1,920 MW agreement in its FY2025 results in February 2026. The existing 300 MW behind-the-meter load is expected to transition to the front-of-the-meter structure after transmission reconfigurations planned for spring 2026, concurrent with a Susquehanna refueling outage. As of late May 2026, whether that transition had completed on schedule could not be independently confirmed.
Talen announced the Freedom and Guernsey acquisitions on July 17, 2025, and closed them on November 25, 2025. Freedom is a combined-cycle gas plant in Pennsylvania (1,049 MW) and Guernsey a combined-cycle plant in Ohio (1,771 MW), bought from Caithness Energy and BlackRock. The price was about $3.5 billion net after estimated tax benefits, or roughly $3.8 billion gross, which Talen described as approximately 6.7 times 2026 EV/EBITDA and a discount to new-build CCGT cost. Talen called the deal immediately accretive and tied it to serving hyperscale and large commercial demand in PJM. It financed the purchase with $2.7 billion of senior unsecured notes, a $1.2 billion senior secured Term Loan B, and increases to its revolving credit and letter-of-credit facilities.
On January 15, 2026, Talen agreed to buy three more gas plants in the pending Cornerstone acquisition from Energy Capital Partners: Waterford in Ohio (875 MW), Darby in Ohio (456 MW), and Lawrenceburg in Indiana (1,120 MW), totaling about 2,451 MW. The price is $3.45 billion, comprising roughly $2.55 billion in cash and 2.4 million Talen shares. Talen expects the deal to close early in the second half of 2026, pending FERC, Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission, and other approvals, and claims it would add more than 15% to annual adjusted free cash flow per share through 2030. Cornerstone is still pending and is excluded from Talen's 2026 guidance.
Talen began as a standalone company on June 1, 2015, when PPL Corporation completed the spin-off of its generation business to PPL shareowners and combined it with Riverstone Holdings' competitive generation. PPL shareowners initially held 65% and Riverstone affiliates 35%. On December 6, 2016, Riverstone bought the remaining 65% of the common stock and took Talen private.
On May 9, 2022, Talen filed for Chapter 11 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas, targeting roughly $4.5 billion of debt. The filing followed a hedging and derivatives strategy that drained liquidity when power and gas prices spiked. The court confirmed the reorganization plan in December 2022, and Talen emerged on May 17, 2023, cutting debt by approximately $2.2 billion, with ownership passing to a majority of former unsecured creditors. Common stock began trading on NASDAQ under TLN on July 10, 2024. Talen has since reduced its share count through buybacks, with weighted-average basic shares falling about 16% from 2024 to 2025.
Talen reported FY2025 revenue of $2,581 million, up from $2,115 million in FY2024, with adjusted EBITDA of $1,035 million (up from $770 million) and adjusted free cash flow of $524 million. Q1 2026 was stronger still: adjusted EBITDA of $473 million, more than double the $200 million in Q1 2025, and adjusted free cash flow of $350 million. Talen reaffirmed 2026 guidance of $1,750 million to $2,050 million in adjusted EBITDA and $980 million to $1,180 million in adjusted free cash flow, both of which exclude any Cornerstone contribution. On a GAAP basis, FY2025 produced a net loss of $(219) million despite the higher revenue and adjusted results, a divergence from the $998 million of GAAP net income in FY2024. Talen attributed the year-over-year swing to the absence of an approximately $890 million aggregate gain on prior-year asset sales recognized in 2024 and a $501 million fourth-quarter 2025 charge tied to a change in accounting for certain existing stock-based awards.
Total debt rose to $6,811 million at the end of 2025, up from $2,987 million of long-term debt at the end of 2024, after the debt-funded gas acquisitions. Talen targets net leverage below 3.5 times net debt to adjusted EBITDA. It has a $2 billion share buyback authorization running through 2028. The company repurchased $103 million of stock in 2025; in 2024 it bought back about 13 million shares, roughly 22% of shares outstanding. Reported liquidity was about $2.1 billion as of February 20, 2026.
Talen describes itself as an independent power producer with a dispatchable nuclear-plus-gas fleet aimed at data-center and large-load growth in PJM. The strategy rests on two pillars: carbon-free nuclear baseload from Susquehanna contracted to Amazon, and combined-cycle gas from Freedom, Guernsey, and the pending Cornerstone plants for additional dispatchable capacity to hyperscalers and large commercial customers. Talen has said it is pursuing more large-load and data-center off-take; no second named hyperscaler PPA had been confirmed as of late May 2026.
On new nuclear, Talen signed a letter of intent with x-energy on March 19, 2026, to assess deploying x-energy's Xe-100 SMRs in Pennsylvania and across PJM, exploring three or more four-unit plants. That work is early-stage, limited to feasibility studies and site evaluation. It runs alongside the SMR exploration agreed with Amazon and the planned Susquehanna uprates. The $2 billion buyback authorization through 2028 runs concurrently with that acquisition spending.
Co-location regulatory precedent.The November 1, 2024 FERC order rejecting the Susquehanna ISA amendment is the defining precedent for co-locating large load directly with generation behind the meter, and the uncertainty it created extends across the sector, not just Talen. The front-of-the-meter restructuring routed around that specific order, but FERC's broader co-location rulemaking remains unresolved and bears on how other generators and data-center developers can structure similar deals.
Single-asset concentration.Susquehanna accounts for roughly half of Talen's annual generation, an approximate figure, and anchors the Amazon revenue. An extended outage, a derate, or a relicensing issue would concentrate the impact in one asset. The plant's NRC licenses run through 2042 and 2044.
Commodity and power-price exposure.Talen is a merchant IPP, so earnings track PJM power and gas prices and capacity-market outcomes. The company attributed part of FY2025's adjusted EBITDA strength to higher PJM energy prices, and its 2022 bankruptcy originated in hedging losses when prices spiked. Price swings move results in both directions.
Execution on the data-center ramp. The Amazon revenue, up to roughly $1.4 billion per year and about $18 billion over the term, depends on the 2029 and 2032 ramp milestones and on the spring-2026 transmission transition. Whether that transition had completed on schedule could not be independently confirmed as of late May 2026, and delays would push out revenue.
Balance sheet and debt.Total debt rose to $6,811 million at the end of 2025 from $2,987 million of long-term debt a year earlier, after debt-funded gas M&A, and the pending Cornerstone deal would add about $2.55 billion of cash consideration. The $2 billion buyback runs alongside this leverage. Talen targets net leverage below 3.5 times, which the closing acquisitions will test.
This profile was compiled from publicly available information including:
Talen Energy Investor Relations — Press releases and earnings materials, including Q4 and FY2025 results (February 26, 2026), Q1 2026 results (May 5, 2026), the expanded Amazon nuclear PPA (June 11, 2025), the Freedom and Guernsey acquisition announcement (July 17, 2025) and completion (November 25, 2025), the Cornerstone acquisition (January 15, 2026), the Brandon Shores and H.A. Wagner RMR settlement (January 27, 2025), and the NASDAQ listing announcement (July 8, 2024).
Talen Energy "Our Portfolio" page — Plant-by-plant fleet capacities and ownership, retrieved May 28, 2026.
SEC filings (Form 10-K, 10-Q, and 8-K; CIK 0001622536) — Financial statements, acquisition terms, and capital structure disclosures.
FERC order rejecting the Susquehanna interconnection service agreement amendment (November 1, 2024); U.S. NRC and Federal Register documentation on the Susquehanna Units 1 and 2 license matter.
Trade press, including Utility Dive, POWER Magazine, World Nuclear News, DataCenterDynamics, and the x-energy SMR letter of intent announcement (March 2026).
This profile is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice, a recommendation, or a solicitation to buy or sell any security.