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Spoiler: They’re mostly winners.
Novele is aiming to smooth out power consumption for commercial buildings, saving tenants money and easing grid strain.
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The company using the only technology proven to achieve breakeven has simulated net energy gain.
Less than two months after publicizing its roadmap to commercial fusion, Inertia Enterprises has checked step one off its list. The startup ran a simulation demonstrating that its first commercial facility will be capable of producing over 25 times more fusion energy than the laser energy put into it, Inertia told Heatmap exclusively.
This is actually the second milestone Inertia has achieved on its 10-point roadmap to building a grid-scale power plant by the mid-2030s — the startup announced last month that it had cut the manufacturing time for its fusion fuel pellets from days to minutes. But for the lay fusion observer, this latest achievement may be the more striking of the two. So far, the only entity to achieve breakeven — the point at which a fusion reaction produces more energy than it consumes — is Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s National Ignition Facility.
Inertia, founded last year by current and former Lawrence Livermore scientists, is now building on that result under a formal research partnership with the lab, using the same technical approach as NIF: firing high-powered lasers at a tiny pellet of fusion fuel, compressing it until the nuclei fuse and release enormous amounts of energy.
The new results, which Inertia said it’s submitting for peer review, demonstrate that the company’s first commercial-scale plant ought to generate over 250 megawatts of electricity for the grid. But because the startup’s machine has yet to be built, the projected energy gain and power output come from a so-called “virtual shot,” a high-fidelity computer simulation that uses the same design codes Lawrence Livermore has used for its own successful ignition experiments, and is thus calibrated and benchmarked against real results.
“We are simulating all the things that we know happen in a fusion experiment, and it’s using the validated models — the best, highest-fidelity physics models that have been validated to NIF ignition experiments — to project where we will be with Inertia,” the startup’s co-founder, Annie Kritcher, told me. The simulation accounts for factors such as “target defects, variations in laser performance, laser delivery, [and] injection tolerances,” she explained.
Even when variables like these fluctuate, Kritcher said, the machine’s energy yield should barely change. That sets Inertia’s system apart from NIF’s, which operates right on the so-called “ignition cliff,” where small imperfections in the fusion fuel target or slight variations in laser performance can determine whether the system achieves ignition at all. But because Inertia designed its system to operate far above that threshold, minor flaws should translate only to modest dips in performance.
Other fusion startups have run simulations demonstrating the validity of their underlying physics and — in industry leader Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ case — even projecting their ability to exceed breakeven. But Kritcher argues that Inertia’s “virtual shot” is a more meaningful achievement because the startup’s plant design replicates the underlying physics validated by NIF, the only fusion experiment yet to cross breakeven in the real world. “The extrapolation risk for the other validation simulations is much, much, much higher,” she told me.
Kritcher has experienced this risk firsthand during her many years running experiments at NIF. When the facility fired its first real shots at ignition in 2011, she was working as a post-doctoral researcher at the national lab, and sincerely believed these early experiments would be a success. But the shots turned out to be “orders of magnitude off” from achieving their goal, thanks to the “unknown unknowns and the physics that weren’t included” in the team’s initial modeling.
Other companies that haven’t yet proven their physics on a real-world machine still face those “unknown unknowns,” she explained, whereas Inertia has been able to unveil and eliminate as many as anyone has yet found. The startup’s plant design is by no means an exact replica of NIF, however. For starters, its fusion targets will be twice as large, and its lasers roughly five times as powerful. The facility will also fire 10 shots per second, compared with NIF’s roughly one shot per week, using thousands of individually adjustable laser beams rather than NIF’s fixed 192. So as is nearly always the case when scaling up, some unknown unknowns likely remain.
But Kritcher is confident that the virtual shot will translate to real world performance — a level of certainty she admittedly hasn’t always had in her decades of nuclear engineering research and practice. In addition to her role at Inertia, Kritcher remains a senior scientist at Lawrence Livermore, where she has led the physics design for NIF’s fusion energy experiments since 2019.
A few years before the lab ultimately achieved breakeven in 2022 — more than a decade after its first attempts — Kritcher was beginning to doubt that they would ever get there. Then, in 2021, NIF reached a breakthrough that went largely unnoticed outside the ranks of dedicated fusion observers: It fired a shot that produced 70% as much fusion energy as the reaction consumed, bringing the facility within striking distance of net energy gain. And while it didn’t reach that threshold, the scientists said the experiment demonstrated ignition — a self-sustaining fusion burn.
The result gave Kritcher assurance that the lab was on the cusp of energy gain. Now, she feels a similar level of confidence that Inertia can translate its simulated 25x energy gain into a real world commercial facility. “The change that we made going from that first ignition result — the 0.7x gain to the [net energy] gain result — that’s the kind of change I feel like we’re making here,” she told me. “It’s working now, and we’re just making it bigger and better.”
The company plans to invest in domestic manufacturing for its high-heat magnets.
Our electricity system runs on magnets. Every transformer stepping voltage up or down, every inductor smoothing out electrical current, and every motor turning electricity into motion relies on the same basic physics: magnetic fields that control the flow of electrons, converting, filtering, and transporting power at every stage. But as AI and electrification push the grid to its limits, better magnetic materials can help power electronics — and our grid itself — keep up.
That’s the bet behind CorePower Magnetics, a Pittsburgh-based startup which raised a $10.6 million funding round co-led by Engine Ventures and Material Impact, announced on Thursday. The startup is developing more efficient, power-dense components such as inductors and transformers using proprietary nanocrystalline magnetic materials, whose ultra-fine grains reduce energy loss. While these materials have historically been brittle and limited to operating at temperatures below 150 degrees Celsius, CorePower says it engineered alloys that can perform above 200 degrees while maintaining durability.
That higher temperature ceiling is critical. As surging electricity demand meets our increasingly complex grid, power electronics like inductors and transformers are being pushed to handle more power, greater voltages, and higher frequencies than ever before. Magnetic material that can run hotter allows engineers to push more power through smaller components. In the context of a data center, for example, that could equate to about a 10% overall reduction in power demand, CorePower’s CEO Sam Kernion told me
“Data centers are the tip of the spear for this really big push into power electronics,” Kernion explained. “If you look more broadly, electricity demand is growing, but the grid itself is becoming a lot more complex, and data centers are just a great example of that.”
Traditionally, electricity flowed unidirectionally from large, centralized power plants to homes, businesses, and other end users. But now the system must support a wider array of both generation and demand sources. Distributed energy resources like rooftop solar panels can generate power directly where it’s consumed, while batteries (and soon electric vehicles) can both draw power and send it back to the grid. Today’s standard electrical equipment isn’t built to handle the bidirectional power flow and real-time current and voltage conversions that this new ecosystem demands.
Solid-state transformer startups such as Heron Power and DG Matrix are tackling this same challenge, using advanced semiconductor technology to convert voltage electronically while also handling functions like bidirectional power flow and alternating-to-direct current conversion. But even these newer systems still generally rely on conventional magnetic materials, which CorePower says have become a key bottleneck.
“We’re taking a car engine, and now we’re going to a jet engine in terms of how different this is,” Kernion told me regarding the demands of this new, higher performance operating environment.
CorePower is designing its advanced, medium-frequency transformers to operate across a broad range of frequencies, from 10 kilohertz to 100 kilohertz. Eventually it plans to sell these transformers to power electronics manufacturers, which will build complete, solid-state systems around the startup’s magnetic core, adding components such as semiconductors and capacitors along with their own software and control systems.
While CorePower hasn’t disclosed any customers to date, it did launch its first product last year, a standardized, low-voltage inductor that’s smaller, lighter, and more efficient than the industry standard. The device smooths out current in power conversion systems, including data center distribution equipment, EV chargers, and inverters that convert DC electricity to AC. Next, CorePower is preparing to launch its standardized transformer product.
The company’s magnet tech could ultimately find numerous applications beyond inductors and transformers. “We’re also able to supply onboard magnetic components for EVs, or uninterruptible power supplies at data centers, or inverters for renewables,” Kernion explained. “Every electron everywhere passes through a magnetic component at some point, so there’s a whole bunch of opportunity out there.”
It’s certainly a fortuitous time to be a domestic power electronics manufacturer. Last month, President Trump signed an executive order banning the import of certain foreign-made bulk power equipment, including substation transformers and grid-connected inverters. While CorePower is mainly focused on producing high-performance equipment that Kernion says can’t currently be sourced domestically or abroad, the push to shore up domestic manufacturing is providing a tailwind for another of its new business lines: amorphous ribbon, a traditional alternative to the electric steel used in conventional distribution transformers on the grid.
With this latest funding, CorePower plans to expand its team and increase manufacturing capacity at its 10,000 square foot pilot manufacturing facility in Pittsburgh, which it was able to complete thanks to a $5 million ARPA-E grant. The company is eventually looking to move into a larger, 100,000 square foot facility in the region to scale its material and component manufacturing further, though there’s no confirmed timeline for this yet.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the final amount of CorePower Magnetic’s fundraise.
