Sign In or Create an Account.

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

Technology

The World’s First Commercial Fusion Plant Will Be in Virginia

Commonwealth Fusion Systems will build it in collaboration with Dominion Energy Virginia.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Commonwealth Fusion Systems

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.”

Yellow

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
Climate

AM Briefing: Congress Saves Energy Star

On betrayed regulatory promises, copper ‘anxiety,’ and Mercedes’ stalled EV plans

Congress Balks at Trump’s Bid to Shoot Down Energy Star
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: New York City is once again choking on Canadian wildfire smoke • Torrential rain is flooding southeastern Slovenia and northern Croatia • Central Asia is bracing for the hottest days of the year, with temperatures nearing 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Uzbekistan’s capital of Tashkent all week.


THE TOP FIVE

1. Congress pushes back on Trump’s plan to kill Energy Star

In May, the Trump administration signaled its plans to gut Energy Star, the energy efficiency certification program administered by the Environmental Protection Agency. Energy Star is extremely popular — its brand is recognized by nearly 90% of Americans — and at a cost to the federal government of just $32 million per year, saves American households upward of $40 billion in energy costs per year as of 2024, for a total of more than $500 billion saved since its launch in 1992, by the EPA’s own estimate. Not only that, as one of Energy Star’s architects told Heatmap’s Jeva Lange back in May, more energy efficient appliances and buildings help reduce strain on the grid. “Think about the growing demands of data center computing and AI models,” RE Tech Advisors’ Deb Cloutier told Jeva. “We need to bring more energy onto the grid and make more space for it.”

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Climate

The West Is Primed for a Megafire

Oregon’s Cram Fire was a warning — the Pacific Northwest is ready to ignite.

The Cram fire.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Jefferson County Sheriff's Office

What could have been the country’s first designated megafire of 2025 spluttered to a quiet, unremarkable end this week. Even as national headlines warned over the weekend that central Oregon’s Cram Fire was approaching the 100,000-acre spread usually required to achieve that status, cooler, damper weather had already begun to move into the region. By the middle of the week, firefighters had managed to limit the Cram to 95,736 acres, and with mop-up operations well underway, crews began rotating out for rest or reassignment. The wildfire monitoring app Watch Duty issued what it said would be its final daily update on the Cram Fire on Thursday morning.

By this time in 2024, 10 megafires had already burned or ignited in the U.S., including the more-than-million-acre Smokehouse Creek fire in Texas last spring. While it may seem wrong to describe 2025 as a quieter fire season so far, given the catastrophic fires in the Los Angeles area at the start of the year, it is currently tracking below the 10-year average for acres burned at this point in the season. Even the Cram, a grassland fire that expanded rapidly due to the hot, dry conditions of central Oregon, was “not [an uncommon fire for] this time of year in the area,” Bill Queen, a public information officer with the Pacific Northwest Complex Incident Management Team 3, told me over email.

Keep reading...Show less
Blue
Electric Vehicles

AM Briefing: America's Big Nuclear Milestone

On China’s Paris pact with Europe, Trump’s mineral geopolitics, and Google’s CO2 battery bet

America’s Nuclear Restart Gets The Green Light
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: The record-setting heat roasting more than 100 million Americans in the central U.S. is now headed for the densely populated Northeast • The American Samoan capital of Pago Pago faces “imminent” flash flooding on Friday amid days of rain • China just set a record for the highest number of hot days since March in its history.

THE TOP FIVE

1. U.S. regulators greenlight America’s first nuclear restart

  The Palisades nuclear plant on the shore of Lake Michigan.Holtec International

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow