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And more on this week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
At least in the short term, developers looking to build quickly have just a few sites to choose from.
The industry is being frozen out of Washington.
The Trump administration is now being lobbied to nix offshore wind projects already under construction.
The Coastal Virginia wind project is already halfway done — but that hasn’t stopped the administration from seeking to interrupt it.
After Trump’s executive orders took aim at wind developers, they’re mostly keeping a stoic silence.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems will build it in collaboration with Dominion Energy Virginia.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems, the buzziest and most well-funded company in the increasingly buzzy and well-funded fusion sector, announced today that it will build a commercial fusion power plant in Chesterfield County, Virginia — a first for both the company and the world. CFS will independently finance, build, own, and operate the 400-megawatt plant, which will produce enough energy to power about 150,000 homes sometime “in the early 2030s.”
All this will happen in collaboration with Dominion Energy Virginia, which serves electricity to more than 2.7 million homes and businesses. While Dominion isn’t contributing monetarily, it is providing CFS with the leasing rights for the proposed site, which it owns, as well as development and technical expertise. The plant itself will cost billions to develop and build.
“While a utility partnership is not a requirement for this type of project, we ultimately see utilities playing a critical role as key customers and future owners of fusion power plants,” a CFS spokesperson told me via email. “Collaborating and sharing expertise allows CFS to accelerate its development efforts while equipping Dominion with valuable insights to inform future commercial decisions and strategies.”
The company told me that after a global search, the decision to site the plant in Virginia came down to factors such as access to infrastructure, site readiness, the local workforce, potential partnerships, state support for the clean energy transition, and customer interest. Virginia is also the world’s biggest market for data centers, a booming industry in dire need of clean, firm energy to power it given the growing energy demands of artificial intelligence. The spokesperson wrote, however, that data center power demand was “only a part of the decision criteria for CFS.”
Commonwealth Fusion Systems has raised over $2 billion in funding to date, including a historically huge $1.8 billion Series B in 2021, which cemented the company as the industry leader in the race to commercialize fusion. The spokesperson told me that construction of the grid-connected commercial plant, known as ARC (an acronym for “affordable, robust, compact”), isn’t expected to begin until the “late 2020s,” once the necessary permits are in place. Prior to building and operating ARC, CFS will demonstrate the technology’s potential via a smaller, noncommercial pilot plant known as SPARC (“smallest possible ARC”), which is scheduled to be turned on in 2026 and to produce more energy than it consumes, a.k.a. demonstrate net energy gain, in 2027. (SPARC will be built at the company’s headquarters outside Boston, Massachusetts.)
Of course, producing electricity from a first-of-its-kind fusion plant will not come cheap, though the company assured me that Virginia customers will not see this higher price reflected in their utility bills. That’s because while CFS plans to sell the electricity ARC generates into the wholesale energy market, the company is also in discussions with large corporate buyers interested in procuring the environmental benefits of this clean energy via long-term, virtual power purchase agreements. That means that while these potential customers wouldn’t receive the literal fusion electrons themselves, they would earn renewable energy credits by essentially covering the cost of the more expensive fusion power. “The intention is that these customers will pay for the power such that other Virginia customers will not be impacted,” the spokesperson told me.
CFS claims that when the time comes, connecting a fusion power plant to the grid should be relatively straightforward. “From the perspective of grid operators, it will operate similarly to natural gas power plants already integrated into the grid today,” the spokesperson wrote. That sets fusion apart from other clean energy sources such as solar and wind, which often languish in seemingly endless interconnection queues as they await the buildout of expensive and contentious transmission infrastructure.
Naturally, CFS is not the only player in the increasingly crowded fusion space aiming to commercialize as soon as possible. If fusion is to play a significant role in the future energy mix, as many experts think it will, there will almost certainly be multiple companies with a variety of technical approaches getting grid-connected. But there’s got to be a first. As Ally Yost, senior vice president of corporate development at CFS, put it to me when I interviewed her this summer, “One of the things that’s most exciting about working here and working in this space is that we are simultaneously building an industry while building a company.”
And more of the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Douglas County, Kansas – A legal headache is consuming Kansas Sky Energy Center, a 159-megawatt solar project proposed by Savion and Evergy … and showcasing how “agri-voltaics” may not be the community engagement panacea some in industry are praying for, according to legal filings reviewed by Heatmap.
2. Worcester County, Maryland – We finally get to see the contours of the legal strategy against the Maryland Offshore Wind Project, after Ocean City and surrounding local business and government officials filed their lawsuit last week.
3. Barnstable County, Massachusetts – Another blow to offshore wind came Friday in the coastal town of Barnstable where leaders voted to oppose cable landings for Avangrid’s New England Wind 2 project.
4. Somewhere near Houston, Texas – The small city of Katy rejected a 500-megawatt battery storage project proposed by Ochoa Energy despite the community struggling with regular blackouts.
Here’s what else I’m keeping tabs on…
In Iowa, a county fighting the Worthwhile Wind farm proposed by Invenergy is asking outside legal counsel for help after a federal judge ruled the project could resume construction.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington city Linda Gorton testified against construction of a 40-megawatt solar farm proposed by the East Kentucky Power Cooperative.
In Massachusetts, a private non-profit that operates historic sites in Nantucket has withdrawn from the Vineyard Wind good neighbor agreement.
In Michigan, the tiny town of Groveland Township is trying to get a restrictive battery storage ordinance in place before a new state law curbing local control comes into effect. (Sorry you’re dealing with this one, Vesper Energy.)
In Virginia, Dominion Energy has sold a non-controlling 50% stake in Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind as public comments resume on the proposed project (which haven’t always been favorable).Editor's note: A previous version of this article misidentified one of the companies behind the Kansas Sky Energy Center. It has been corrected. We regret the error.
