By Anton Caputo
San Antonio Express-News

Toshiba Inc. has already shaved roughly $1.4 billion off its price to build two nuclear reactors, but it's unlikely to ever reach an amount within San Antonio's price range, NRG Energy executives said Thursday.

"We would expect... the price estimate that Toshiba will come back with is outside the affordability of their ratepayers," Steve Winn, CEO of the NRG-owned Nuclear Innovation North America, said at an analyst's meeting in Houston.

At issue is the cost that San Antonio's CPS Energy and NRG Energy are willing to pay contractor Toshiba to build two nuclear rectors outside of Bay City.

CPS has promised the community and City Council that it will pursue the deal as long as it can limit power bill increases to 5 percent every other year for the next decade. This can be done if the total project, with financing, will cost about $13 billion, CPS officials say.

To hit that amount, Toshiba's costs need to come in around $8 billion. But the Japanese contractor, NRG confirmed, estimated the price at $12.1 billion in October. The Japanese contractor already has shaved roughly $1.3 to $1.4 billion off that estimate.

Ultimately, Winn said, NRG was confident it could negotiate Toshiba down to $10 billion or less, but not near the $8 billion that CPS has targeted.

Winn acknowledged that his company, which will sell the power produced by the reactors on the open market, and the municipally owned CPS Energy are judging the project in different ways.

"Right now their constraint is more around non-long-term economic decisions and near-term rate shock," he said.