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The birthplace of electricity has more recently been known more for smokestacks and traffic jams than world-changing energy breakthroughs. But that could be about to change.
Why New Jersey? I’ll admit, that’s what I was wondering as my S.U.V. took a Sopranos-adjacent route from midtown Manhattan to an industrial park in Kearny, the Newark suburb bounded by the Passaic River to the west and a landfill to the east, where the holy grail of energy may soon be forged.
I was visiting the nuclear fusion company Thea Energy, which is in the process of designing a stellarator, a kind of torqued donut — French crullers were mentioned several times by Thea cofounder and chief executive Brian Berzin during my time there — that, with the help of 450 magnets and about 15 megawatts of power, could one day hold plasma in place, thereby creating the conditions for the same nuclear reaction that powers the stars to happen here on Earth.
The New Jersey facility was, to my eyes, part tech startup and part laboratory, with rows of desks in an open office and then, once the requisite eye-safety equipment was applied, a laboratory and small-scale manufacturing site.
There were workers winding high-temperature superconductor tape using what can only be described as an oversized VCR-like device named “Zeus” (Greek mythology is the company’s primary motif; the eventual fusion device will be called “Eos,” the goddess of dawn, while Thea is the goddess of light) to make the magnets that could one day make up the stellarator.
We walked past a precision cutting device known as a CNC machine for milling parts on site. Berzin was particularly proud of Thea’s ability to quickly iterate this part of the manufacturing process. A year ago, “when we wanted a new piece of stainless steel in that very specific configuration, we sent out engineering drawings to a third party — sometimes in the United States, sometimes abroad — for them to mill that piece of metal.”
That process “takes a couple of weeks, and then they send it back to you. Sometimes it’s not perfect — you have to get rid of a burr. The quality control is all over the place.” By milling on-site, Thea engineers can make parts and components faster and figure out more quickly what they actually need.
The last stop on the tour was the Canis, a kind of aluminum gougère held up by spindly legs that contained within it an array of nine magnets, with each magnet connected to 50 sensors that could dynamically control and adjust for any errors or misalignments in the magnetic fields. These mass-manufactured magnets could eventually allow the stellarator to be something more like a standard off-the-line product than a finnicky, boutique, one-of-a-kind science project that can only be installed and monitored by plasma physics PhDs.
“We can use very basic manufacturing technologies,” Berzin said. “Here we’re sitting in New Jersey right now. Things are built by local trade laborers, unionized laborers. As much as I love PhDs, power plants are not built by people that have PhDs from MIT or Harvard.”
The facility had a well-worn aura of frugality, a virtue rarely associated with fusion research, which is famous for international consortia taking decades and billions of dollars to come up with working devices, if they ever do. Last year, the team behind the ITER fusion reactor, whose history stretches back to 1985, announced that operation would be delayed until the mid-2030s, a nine-year setback that will likely tack on another €5 billion (around $5.8 billion) to the total cost of over €20 billion.
By contrast, Berzin told me, “when investors and stakeholders come to visit our labs, the one reaction that occurs frequently is, Wow, you’ve done all of this with only $20 million?”
Thea’s primary competitors in the booming private fusion industry, which has attracted over $7 billion in private investment globally, can be found outside Boston, where Commonwealth Fusion Systems spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or north of Seattle, where Sam Altman-backed Helion is located, well known centers of scientific research and technology businesses.
Some of these competitors are incredibly well funded, especially CFS, which has raised around $2 billion — a substantial portion of all money raised by fusion companies everywhere.
Thea, by contrast, has raised around $30 million all told, with $20 million coming in a Series A backed by Prelude Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, and other venture investors.
Berzin attributed this cost efficiency in part to the company’s heavy use of software in design and operations, which is a “more scalable, more cost-efficient thing,” he told me. “We’ve been able to go very far with our Series A compared to our peers,” which he credits to a “pretty gritty mindset.”
And yet still I wondered: Why North Jersey, an area better known for turnpikes, swamps, and pharmaceutical companies? “New York, New Jersey, the greater New York City area, I think notoriously within the investor-VC-tech community, is seen as being behind the ball,” Berzin said.
“I'm really proud to be here in the tri-state area. You have some great industries, people move to New York City to be in the center of the universe for one of many fields, and that has been something we've been able to leverage. All these different skill-sets and engineering talent pools weren't necessarily in fusion before,” Berzin said. “Control systems, optimization, manufacturing — these people exist within the New York City area.”
Northern New Jersey itself is something of an energy crossroads. It lies between two centers of fusion research — the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, where the stellarator was first dreamed up and from which Thea itself was spun out, and Columbia University, which has its own fusion and plasma physics research programs.
Northern New Jersey is also centrally located within PJM Interconnection, the United States’s largest electricity market. Northern New Jersey is also centrally located within PJM Interconnection, the United States’s largest electricity market. While there isn’t yet a site for Thea to actually install their system in a power plant, executives did point to brownfield sites such as a decommissioned coal plant in Jersey City, which already has interconnection with the grid.
Not for nothing, New Jersey has been a center for electricity innovation for just about as long as there’s been a commercial market for electricity. Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park lab was located about 20 miles south of Thea. The company’s co-founder David Gates is a winner of the Edison Patent Award for the stellarator work at the Princeton lab.
Plus, “I live in New York City,” Berzin added. “It’s the center of the universe.”
If you can make fusion happen here — or at least across the Hudson from here — you might be able to make it happen anywhere.
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Amarillo-area residents successfully beat back a $600 million project from Xcel Energy that would have provided useful tax revenue.
Power giant Xcel Energy just suffered a major public relations flap in the Texas Panhandle, scrubbing plans for a solar project amidst harsh backlash from local residents.
On Friday, Xcel Energy withdrew plans to build a $600 million solar project right outside of Rolling Hills, a small, relatively isolated residential neighborhood just north of the city of Amarillo, Texas. The project was part of several solar farms it had proposed to the Texas Public Utilities Commission to meet the load growth created by the state’s AI data center boom. As we’ve covered in The Fight, Texas should’ve been an easier place to do this, and there were few if any legal obstacles standing in the way of the project, dubbed Oneida 2. It was sited on private lands, and Texas counties lack the sort of authority to veto projects you’re used to seeing in, say, Ohio or California.
But a full-on revolt from homeowners and realtors apparently created a public relations crisis.
Mere weeks ago, shortly after word of the project made its way through the small community that is Rolling Hills, more than 60 complaints were filed to the Texas Public Utilities Commission in protest. When Xcel organized a public forum to try and educate the public about the project’s potential benefits, at least 150 residents turned out, overwhelmingly to oppose its construction. This led the Minnesota-based power company to say it would scrap the project entirely.
Xcel has tried to put a happy face on the situation. “We are grateful that so many people from the Rolling Hills neighborhood shared their concerns about this project because it gives us an opportunity to better serve our communities,” the company said in a statement to me. “Moving forward, we will ask for regulatory approval to build more generation sources to meet the needs of our growing economy, but we are taking the lessons from this project seriously.”
But what lessons, exactly, could Xcel have learned? What seems to have happened is that it simply tried to put a solar project in the wrong place, prizing convenience and proximity to an existing electrical grid over the risk of backlash in an area with a conservative, older population that is resistant to change.
Just ask John Coffee, one of the commissioners for Potter County, which includes Amarillo, Rolling Hills, and a lot of characteristically barren Texas landscape. As he told me over the phone this week, this solar farm would’ve been the first utility-scale project in the county. For years, he said, renewable energy developers have explored potentially building a project in the area. He’s entertained those conversations for two big reasons – the potential tax revenue benefits he’s seen elsewhere in Texas; and because ordinarily, a project like Oneida 2 would’ve been welcomed in any of the pockets of brush and plain where people don’t actually live.
“We’re struggling with tax rates and increases and stuff. In the proper location, it would be well-received,” he told me. “The issue is, it’s right next to a residential area.”
Indeed, Oneida 2 would’ve been smack dab up against Rolling Hills, occupying what project maps show would be the land surrounding the neighborhood’s southeast perimeter – truly the sort of encompassing adjacency that anti-solar advocates like to describe as a bogeyman.
Cotton also told me he wasn’t notified about the project’s existence until a few weeks ago, at the same time resident complaints began to reach a fever pitch. He recalled hearing from homeowners who were worried that they’d no longer be able to sell their properties. When I asked him if there was any data backing up the solar farm’s potential damage to home prices, he said he didn’t have hard numbers, but that the concerns he heard directly from the head of Amarillo’s Realtors Association should be evidence enough.
Many of the complaints against Oneida 2 were the sort of stuff we’re used to at The Fight, including fears of fires and stormwater runoff. But Cotton said it really boiled down to property values – and the likelihood that the solar farm would change the cultural fabric in Rolling Hills.
“This is a rural area. There are about 300 homes out there. Everybody sitting out there has half an acre, an acre, two acres, and they like to enjoy the quiet, look out their windows and doors, and see some distance,” he said.
Ironically, Cotton opposed the project on the urging of his constituents, but is now publicly asking Xcel to continue to develop solar in the county. “Hopefully they’ll look at other areas in Potter County,” he told me, adding that at least one resident has already come to him with potential properties the company could acquire. “We could really use the tax money from it. But you just can’t harm a community for tax dollars. That’s not what I’m about.”
I asked Xcel how all this happened and what their plans are next. A spokesperson repeatedly denied my requests to discuss Oneida 2 in any capacity. In a statement, the company told me it “will provide updates if the project is moved to another site,” and that “the company will continue to evaluate whether there is another location within Potter County, or elsewhere, to locate the solar project.”
Meanwhile, Amarillo may be about to welcome data center development because of course, and there’s speculation the first AI Stargate facility may be sited near Amarillo, as well.
City officials will decide in the coming weeks on whether to finalize a key water agreement with a 5,600-acre private “hypergrid” project from Fermi America, a new company cofounded by former Texas governor Rick Perry, says will provide upwards of 11 gigawatts to help fuel artificial intelligence services. Fermi claims that at least 1 gigawatt of power will be available by the end of next year – a lot of power.
The company promises that its “hypergrid” AI campus will use on-site gas and nuclear generation, as well as contracted gas and solar capacity. One thing’s for sure – it definitely won’t be benefiting from a large solar farm nearby anytime soon.
And more of the most important news about renewable projects fighting it out this week.
1. Racine County, Wisconsin – Microsoft is scrapping plans for a data center after fierce opposition from a host community in Wisconsin.
2. Rockingham County, Virginia – Another day, another chokepoint in Dominion Energy’s effort to build more solar energy to power surging load growth in the state, this time in the quaint town of Timberville.
3. Clark County, Ohio – This county is one step closer to its first utility-scale solar project, despite the local government restricting development of new projects.
4. Coles County, Illinois – Speaking of good news, this county reaffirmed the special use permit for Earthrise Energy’s Glacier Moraine solar project, rebuffing loud criticisms from surrounding households.
5. Lee County, Mississippi – It’s full steam ahead for the Jugfork solar project in Mississippi, a Competitive Power Ventures proposal that is expected to feed electricity to the Tennessee Valley Authority.
A conversation with Enchanted Rock’s Joel Yu.
This week’s chat was with Joel Yu, senior vice president for policy and external affairs at the data center micro-grid services company Enchanted Rock. Now, Enchanted Rock does work I usually don’t elevate in The Fight – gas-power tracking – but I wanted to talk to him about how conflicts over renewable energy are affecting his business, too. You see, when you talk to solar or wind developers about the potential downsides in this difficult economic environment, they’re willing to be candid … but only to a certain extent. As I expected, someone like Yu who is separated enough from the heartburn that is the Trump administration’s anti-renewables agenda was able to give me a sober truth: Land use and conflicts over siting are going to advantage fossil fuels in at least some cases.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
Help me understand where, from your perspective, the generation for new data centers is going to come from. I know there are gas turbine shortages, but also that solar and wind are dealing with headwinds in the United States given cuts to the Inflation Reduction Act.
There are a lot of stories out there about certain technologies coming out to the forefront to solve the problem, whether it’s gas generation or something else. But the scale and the scope of this stuff … I don’t think there is a silver bullet where it’s all going to come from one place.
The Energy Department put out a request for information looking for ways to get to 3 gigawatts quickly, but I don’t think there is any way to do that quickly in the United States. It’s going to take work from generation developers, batteries, thermal generation, emerging storage technologies, and transmission. Reality is, whether it is supply chain issues or technology readiness or the grid’s readiness to accept that load generation profile, none of it is ready. We need investment and innovation on all fronts.
How do conflicts over siting play into solving the data center power problem? Like, how much of the generation that we need for data center development is being held back by those fights?
I do have an intuitive sense that the local siting and permitting concerns around data centers are expanding in scope from the normal noise and water considerations to include impacts to energy affordability and reliability, as well as the selection of certain generation technologies. We’ve seen diesel generation, for example, come into the spotlight. It’s had to do with data center permitting in certain jurisdictions, in places like Maryland and Minnesota. Folks are realizing that a data center comes with a big power plant – their diesel generation. When other power sources fall short, they’ll rely on their diesel more frequently, so folks are raising red flags there. Then, with respect to gas turbines or large cycle units, there’s concerns about viewsheds, noise and cooling requirements, on top of water usage.
How many data center projects are getting their generation on-site versus through the grid today?
Very few are using on-site generation today. There’s a lot of talk about it and interest, but in order to serve our traditional cloud services data center or AI-type loads, they’re looking for really high availability rates. That’s really costly and really difficult to do if you’re off the grid and being serviced by on-site generation.
In the context of policy discussions, co-location has primarily meant baseload resources on sites that are serving the data centers 24/7 – the big stories behind Three Mile Island and the Susquehanna nuclear plant. But to be fair, most data centers operational today have on-site generation. That’s their diesel backup, what backstops the grid reliability.
I think where you’re seeing innovation is modular gas storage technologies and battery storage technologies that try to come in and take the space of the diesel generation that is the standard today, increasing the capability of data centers in terms of on-site power relative to status quo. Renewable power for data centers at scale – talking about hundreds of megawatts at a time – I think land is constraining.
If a data center is looking to scale up and play a balancing act of competing capacity versus land for energy production, the competing capacity is extremely valuable. They’re going to prioritize that first and pack as much as they can into whatever land they have to develop. Data centers trying to procure zero-carbon energy are primarily focused on getting that energy over wires. Grid connection, transmission service for large-scale renewables that can match the scale of natural gas, there’s still very strong demand to stay connected to the grid for reliability and sustainability.
Have you seen the state of conflict around renewable energy development impact data center development?
Not necessarily. There is an opportunity for data center development to coincide with renewable project development from a siting perspective, if they’re going to be co-located or near to each other in remote areas. For some of these multi-gigawatt data centers, the reason they’re out in the middle of nowhere is a combination of favorable permitting and siting conditions for thousands of acres of data center building, substations and transmission –
Sorry, but even for projects not siting generation, if megawatts – if not gigawatts – are held up from coming to the grid over local conflicts, do you think that’s going to impact data center development at all? The affordability conversions? The environmental ones?
Oh yeah, I think so. In the big picture, the concern is if you can integrate large loads reliably and affordably. Governors, state lawmakers are thinking about this, and it’s bubbling up to the federal level. You need a broad set of resources on the grid to provide that adequacy. To the extent you hold up any grid resources, renewable or otherwise, you’re going to be staring down some serious challenges in serving the load. Virginia’s a good example, where local groups have held up large-scale renewable projects in the state, and Dominion’s trying to build a gas peaker plant that’s being debated, too. But in the meantime, it is Data Center Alley, and there are gigawatts of data centers that continue to want to get in and get online as quickly as possible. But the resources to serve that load are not coming online in time.
The push toward co-location probably does favor thermal generation and battery storage technologies over straight renewable energy resources. But a battery can’t cover 24/7 use cases for a data center, and neither will our unit. We’re positioned to be a bridge resource for 24/7 use for a few years until they can get more power to the market, and then we can be a flexible backup resource – not a replacement for the large-scale and transmission-connected baseload power resources, like solar and wind. Texas has benefited from huge deployments of solar and wind. That has trickled down to lower electricity costs. Those resources can’t do it alone, and there’s thermal to balance the system, but you need it all to meet the load growth.