ONE Nuclear’s First Named Project Is a 2.88 GW Gas Plant, and What It Signed Is a Land Deal

ONE Nuclear Energy executed a binding letter of intent on 31 August 2026 for Project Cayman in Ascension Parish, Louisiana. The project pairs a 2.88 GW natural gas plant with a 700 MW, 2.88 GWh battery system. A data center campus sits alongside it. The Florida-based developer signed with what it called a prominent Louisiana landowner group.

The agreement gives the company site control. It does not give the company an interconnection position, a construction contract or a named data center tenant.

The site sits near the RiverPlex MegaPark, a 17,000-acre industrial tract on the west bank of the Mississippi River. It lies northeast of the $100 billion launch complex SpaceX has announced for Vermilion Parish.

ONE Nuclear says the project complements Entergy’s buildout of regional transmission. That is the company describing a fit, not Entergy committing to serve the load.

A nuclear developer announcing a gas plant

The capacity is gas. The company name is nuclear. Project Cayman carries no reactor. The announcement describes dispatchable generation, storage and data center infrastructure, and no nuclear unit anywhere in it. Richard Taylor, CEO of ONE Nuclear, framed the project around regional economic development, jobs and the local tax base.

The timing is worth noting. Hennessy Capital Investment Corp. VII shareholders approved a business combination with ONE Nuclear on 24 August 2026. That vote came seven days before the LOI announcement.

The combined company expects to trade under the ticker ONEN once the deal closes, which the parties anticipate in the second half of 2026. ONE Nuclear filed the Project Cayman release with the Securities and Exchange Commission under Rule 425. That form covers communications about a pending merger.

What the 2.88 GWh actually buys

The battery is sized at 700 MW and 2.88 GWh, a duration of just over four hours. Four-hour storage next to a gas plant serving a data center is a ramp and contingency asset. It covers the minutes when a large computational load swings. It also covers the gap while gas units come up.

It is not a substitute for the gas capacity, and the numbers do not pretend otherwise. ONE Nuclear says public information meetings with parishes and government agencies run from now through the end of the year.

Why It Matters

Louisiana sits inside MISO. Three days before this announcement, MISO asked federal regulators to impose ramp limits, ride-through duties and phasor monitoring on loads above 50 MW. A data center campus attached to 2.88 GW of new generation is exactly the customer those rules target.

The MISO proposal grandfathers existing and nearly complete commercial arrangements. A project holding site control and nothing else is not close enough to completion to expect shelter.

Read the announcement for what it says it is. A binding LOI over land is a real step. Seventeen thousand acres beside existing industrial transmission is a real asset. But site control is the cheapest milestone in a generation project.

The expensive ones are the interconnection study, the gas supply, the turbine slot and a tenant willing to sign. None of those is announced. Watch for an interconnection request and a named offtaker before treating 2.88 GW as capacity that will exist.

Critical Perspective

Put the two capacity numbers side by side. The gas plant is 2.88 GW. The battery is 700 MW, about a quarter of that output, for roughly four hours. The storage cannot ride out a loss of the gas plant, and it is not sized to. It is a ramping and short-contingency asset, which is a reasonable design, but the matched 2.88 figures invite a reading of resilience the equipment does not support.

Three parties in this announcement are unnamed. The landowner group is unnamed. The data center tenant is unnamed. No interconnection request is described. A binding LOI commits the signers to a land position. It does not commit anyone to buy power, build a turbine or energize a substation, and each of those is a harder signature to get than the one announced.

The disclosure route deserves attention too. ONE Nuclear published this through a Rule 425 filing, the channel for merger communications, seven days after the Hennessy VII vote and before the transaction closes. That timing is legal and ordinary. It also means the first audience for a 2.88 GW project announcement is a market still pricing a pending combination.

Sources

• Business Wire: ONE Nuclear Executes Binding LOI for Project Cayman
• SEC: Hennessy Capital Investment Corp. VII Form 425
• POWER Magazine: One Nuclear Signs Deal for 2.88-GW Gas-Fired Plant, Large BESS
• Energy-Storage.news: ONE Nuclear Energy executes LOI for 2.88GWh BESS and gas plant

Related Coverage

• NRG Lines Up a $3.2 Billion 1.2 GW Texas Gas Plant Paid by Capacity, Not by Data Center Output: similar gas plant project
• Nebraska Public Power District Starts a $3.1 Billion 694 MW Plant as the Governor Pauses Data Center Incentives: comparable energy infrastructure development
• GE Vernova Gas Turbine Backlog Reaches 100 GW, Driven by Data: gas turbine technology relevance
• FERC Orders All Six Grid Operators: grid operator impact on projects