Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Climate Tech

Why Is Thea Energy, the Fusion Company, in New Jersey?

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.

New Jersey things.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons, Thea Energy

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.

Blue

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Energy

The Nuclear Power Dealmaking Boom Is Real

Thank data center developers and, yes, Trump.

A nuclear power plant.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Whichever way you cut it, this has been an absolute banner year for nuclear deals in the U.S. It doesn’t much matter the metric — the amount of venture funding flowing to nuclear startups, the number of announcements regarding planned reactor restarts and upgrades, gigawatts of new construction added to the pipeline — it’s basically all peaking. Stock prices are up across all major publicly traded nuclear companies this year, in some cases by over 100%.

“This year is by far the biggest year in terms of nuclear deals that has occurred, probably, since the 70s,” Adam Stein, the director of nuclear innovation at The Breakthrough Institute, told me. “It’s spanning the gamut from bringing a 40-year-old reactor back to things that have not even been proven scientifically yet.”

Keep reading...Show less
Blue
Electric Vehicles

AM Briefing: U.S. Power’s Record Surge

On the Senate’s climate whip, green cement deals, and a U.S. uranium revival.

U.S. Electricity Demand Surges to Back-to-Back Records
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Flash flooding strikes the Southeastern U.S. • Monsoon rains unleash landslides in southern China • A heat dome is bringing temperatures of up to 107 degrees Fahrenheit to France, Italy, and the Balkans.

THE TOP FIVE

1. The U.S. broke electricity demand records twice in July

An August 5 chart showing last month's record electricity demand peaks.EIA

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Podcast

Trump’s Move to Kill the Clean Air Act’s Climate Authority Forever

Rob and Jesse talk through the proposed overturning of the EPA’s “endangerment finding” on greenhouse gases with Harvard Law School’s Jody Freeman.

The Capitol.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Trump administration has formally declared that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are not dangerous pollutants. If the president gets his way, then the Environmental Protection Agency may soon surrender any ability to regulate heat-trapping pollution from cars and trucks, power plants, and factories — in ways that a future Democratic president potentially could not reverse.

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, we discuss whether Trump’s EPA gambit will work, the arguments that the administration is using, and what it could mean for the future of U.S. climate and energy policy. We’re joined by Jody Freeman, the Archibald Cox Professor of Law at Harvard and the director of Harvard’s environmental and energy law program. She was an architect of the Obama administration’s landmark deal with automakers to accept carbon dioxide regulations.

Keep reading...Show less