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Getting a commercial reactor online by the 2030s doesn’t sound as crazy as it used to.
There’s a reason they call a seemingly impossible technological reach a “moonshot.” Over the years, the term has been used to refer to virtual reality, self-driving cars, and biometric identification such as DNA fingerprinting. Now, it’s fusion’s turn.
“Where we are on fusion is kind of where we were on getting to the moon when Kennedy gave his speech,” Phil Larochelle, a founding partner at Breakthrough Energy Ventures who leads its fusion investment strategy, told me, referencing John F. Kennedy’s 1962 speech about putting a man on the moon by 1970. “Did they have any idea how they were going to make a guidance computer that was actually going to get on the moon? No. Did they have the rockets that they needed that were strong enough to get to the moon? No. And so it’s kind of like that in fusion.”
There have already been some high-profile milestones over the past few years. Toward the end of 2022, the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Lab beat breakeven, creating a fusion reaction that produced more energy than it took to heat up the fusion plasma. Or when the startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a.k.a. CFS, announced that it had developed a new type of extremely powerful magnet to better contain and control superheated plasma. Now, startups and investors think the next decade will be critical for commercialization.
“When we started BEV, we kind of assumed that fusion was going to be too far off,” said Larochelle. But after talking with CFS and learning more about the company’s magnet tech, minds changed. Breakthrough invested in the company — and eventually three other fusion startups, too. “These better magnets matter a lot,” Larochelle told me. “It matters as much as the transistor did to a computer. It’s that level of component level breakthrough that totally changes the game.”
For the ordinary optimist, fusion energy might invoke a cheerful Jetsons-style future of flying cars and interplanetary colonization. For the cynic, it’s a world-changing moment that’s perpetually 30 years away. But investors, nuclear engineers, and physicists see it as a technology edging ever closer to commercialization and a bipartisan pathway towards both energy security and decarbonization.
To some extent at least, the data backs them up. According to the Fusion Industry Association, over 60% of all private fusion companies were founded in 2019 or later. And in the past three years alone, fusion companies have brought in over $5.1 billion, over 70% of the sector’s total funding since 1992.
“We would hope to see a breakeven moment by private companies in the next two to three years, by 2028-ish,” followed by a commercial reactor in the mid-2030s, Julien Barber, an investor at Emerson Collective, told me. Thus far, Emerson, which is headed by Laurene Powell Jobs, has invested in two fusion companies, CFS and Xcimer Energy.
The major players in the startup ecosystem say they’re on track to get there. “The progress has actually been faster than Moore’s law,” Ally Yost, senior vice president of corporate development at CFS, told me, “but people weren't looking at that.”
Moore’s law is a prediction — largely validated for decades — that the number of transistors on a microchip, and thus a computer’s processing speed, would generally double every two years. The performance of fusion reactors, especially the donut-shaped tokamak reactors that CFS uses, has historically improved at an even faster rate. But due to some midcentury researchers and technology enthusiasts overpromising on the near-term feasibility of fusion, cynicism remains. It also doesn’t help that the large, intergovernmental fusion megaproject known as ITER has consistently faced delays and huge cost overruns due to the technical complexity of the project, as well as the difficulty of wrangling 35 countries to work together.
Thus far, though, the private sector is faring better. CFS has raised over $2 billion, more than any other private company in the space. It uses an approach known as magnetic confinement fusion, which involves using strong magnets to confine fusion fuel in the form of a plasma. If you can keep the plasma dense enough and hot enough for long enough, atoms start fusing together, releasing a vast amount of energy in the process. ITER, as well as startups including Type One Energy, Thea Energy, and Renaissance Fusion are pursuing the same fundamental route, though with their own technical twists.
Lawrence Livermore, on the other hand, achieved its breakthrough fusion reaction (which it’s since repeated several times) using an approach known as inertial confinement, in which powerful lasers fire at a pellet of fusion fuel, causing rapid compression and heating that leads to nuclear fusion. But the national lab is not aiming to create a commercial reactor. So when the founders of the startup Xcimer Energy saw that the National Ignition Facility was closing in on its goal, they jumped to get inertial confinement tech ready for market.
“In August of 2021, NIF achieved a fusion gain of about 0.6,” Xcimer’s President and CTO, Alexander Valys, told me, referring to the ratio of the energy generated by the fusion reaction to the energy required to heat the fusion plasma. An energy gain of one constitutes breakeven, so the moment didn’t get any mainstream press to speak of. “But inside the field, everyone knew that the previous NIF shot record was effectively a gain of like 0.01,” Valys said. The massive jump indicated to him that, “If we’re going to do this, we have to do it now.” Since then Xcimer has gotten backing from the biggest names in the space, including BEV, Lowercarbon Capital, and Emerson Collective, as it looks to build lasers at lower cost and higher power.
One thing that ties fusion’s various technical approaches together is the fact that they’ve all benefited tremendously from advances in supercomputing, which allows researchers to better model plasma physics and rapidly simulate fusion experiments. “It’s really taken the advent of modern computational methods and supercomputers to be able to model that process with sufficient accuracy, that you can actually develop a machine that recreates those conditions,” Christofer Mowry, CEO of the magnetic confinement startup Type One Energy, told me.
At this point, many leading companies say that the problem is no longer about basic science, but cost. Clea Kolster, head of science at Lowercarbon Capital, told me that once CFS turns on its demonstration reactor, the company knows its fusion gain will be “at least greater than two.” (Lowercarbon is a CFS investor.) That said, there’s still loads of uncertainty around the reactor’s performance, as outside studies project that its energy gain will be more like 11 — although even that might not be enough for it to make economic sense.
So while the economics of fusion are a large part of what venture capitalists are betting on these days, private investment in the industry has actually fallen over the past two years, after peaking in 2022 at $2.8 billion. “A step change in growth will be required once private companies deliver results on their prototype machines,” Andrew Holland, CEO of the Fusion Industry Association, said in a statement, adding that last year’s $900 million in funding “will not be enough to deliver fusion’s ambitious goals.”
To date, government funding has comprised a mere 6% of the industry’s total, but contra the private funding trend, that figure has been ticking up as of late. Last year, the Department of Energy announced $46 million in funding for eight private fusion companies to help the administration reach its goal of demonstrating fusion at pilot scale within a decade.
All the companies I spoke with were awardees, and all agreed that much more would be needed, pointing to the public-private partnership between NASA and SpaceX as a model for how the government could more deeply support commercialization of fusion. That partnership was the product of NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, designed to catalyze the development of private spacecraft and funded to the tune of $800 million.
China, meanwhile, is outspending the U.S. on fusion, just as it’s done with solar, and launched a national fusion consortium at the beginning of this year.
“We are about to harness the sun a second time, and we can’t make that mistake again. We have to get serious about building this industry here in the United States,” Clay Dumas, a partner at Lowercarbon Capital, told me. The firm has a dedicated $250 million fusion fund, and has invested in a total of eight companies in the space, spanning a wide array of technical approaches. “That is going to take the combined efforts of investors and entrepreneurs and policymakers and energy companies and governments to make sure that we can drive this forward on the timeframe that it needs to happen.”
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A climate tech company powered by natural gas has always been an odd concept. Now as it moves into developing data centers, it insists it’s remaining true to its roots.
Crusoe Energy has always been a confusing company, whose convoluted green energy credentials raise some eyebrows. It started as a natural gas-powered Bitcoin miner, then became a climate tech unicorn thanks to the fact that its crypto operations utilized waste gas that would have otherwise been flared into the atmosphere. It’s received significant backing from major clean tech investors such as G2 Venture Partners and Lowercarbon Capital. And it touts sustainability as one of its main selling points, describing itself as “on a mission to align the future of computing with the future of the climate,” in part by “harnessing large-scale clean energy.”
But these days, the late-stage startup valued at $2.8 billion makes the majority of its revenue as a modular data center manufacturer and cloud services provider, and is exploring myriad energy solutions — from natural gas to stranded solar and wind assets — beyond its original focus. Earlier this week, it announced that it would acquire more than 4 gigawatts of new natural gas capacity to power its data center buildout. It’s also heavily involved in the Trump-endorsed $500 billion AI push known as the Stargate Project. The company’s Elon Musk-loving CEO Chase Lochmiller told The Information that his team is “pouring concrete at three in the morning” to build out its Stargate Project data centers at “ludicrous speed.”
Some will understandably take a glance at this rising data center behemoth and wonder if climate tech is really an accurate description of what Crusoe actually does these days. As the steady drumbeat of announcements and press surrounding Crusoe’s partnerships and power deals has built up, I certainly wondered whether the company had pivoted to simply churning out data centers as quickly as possible. But investors — and the company itself — told me that’s far from true.
Clay Dumas, a partner at Lowercarbon Capital, which invested in the company’s $128 million Series B and $350 million Series C rounds, told me that Crusoe remains as mission-focused as ever. “When it comes to power, Crusoe is the most aggressive innovator in the AI infrastructure space,” Dumas said via text message. “There is no better team to integrate new energy sources for compute workloads so we don’t turn the whole world into one giant fracking operation.”
Ben Kortlang, a partner at G2 Venture Partners, which led the company’s Series C round, agreed, telling me that Crusoe is best positioned to build out data centers in a way that doesn’t “plant the seeds for 50 or 100 years of environmental damage.”
Yet it’s hard to pin down exactly what the energy mix will end up looking like for the high-profile data centers in Crusoe’s pipeline, including the complex it’s currently building for OpenAI, which is part of the Stargate project in Abilene, Texas. The company announced on Tuesday that it had started construction on the second phase of the facility, which expands the total scope from around 200 megawatts of power across two facilities to include a total of eight buildings over 4 million square feet, using 1.2 gigawatts of power. Crusoe’s spokesperson, Andrew Schmitt, declined to comment on whether this additional capacity would serve Stargate.
What Schmitt did confirm via email is that while the project has a 1.2 gigawatt grid interconnection — enough to meet the entirety of its power needs — Crusoe will also rely on natural gas as “backup energy,” as well as behind-the-meter energy solutions such as solar and battery storage to “create a highly optimized and efficient power plan for the full site.”
The company also won’t speculate on how much energy will come from each particular source. To some degree, the exact grid energy mix and what additional energy resources will get built is unknowable, though Schmitt told me that Crusoe chose Abilene for the area’s abundant wind resources. There’s often too much of it for the grid to handle, meaning the excess energy is curtailed or sold at a negative price. But if a large load — say, a Crusoe data center — were added to the grid, less renewable energy would go to waste, thereby increasing the profitability of renewables projects and incentivizing more buildout overall.
This strategy, Schmitt told me, “reflects [Crusoe’s] guiding principle of bringing load to stranded and under-utilized energy” rather than bringing energy sources to the data center load itself, as the industry has traditionally done. G2, the venture capital firm, is all in on this premise. “By putting a big load center right there in a fantastic renewable resource environment, the thing that will naturally get built is renewables,” Kortlang told me. “Crusoe doesn’t need to mandate that, or control that, or be the one building the renewables. They’re creating the demand.”
But this approach is only net-positive for the climate if it increases the share of renewables in the mix overall, i.e. if new, large loads are leading to more solar and wind buildout than new natural gas buildout. And while a renewables-heavy buildout seems to be what Crusoe and its investors are assuming will happen, Crusoe can’t actually control what gets put on the grid or the economic or political factors that drive those decisions.
It appears to be inevitable that gas will play some role, even if it’s providing power directly to the data center itself and not to the grid overall. According to Business Insider, public filings with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality show that so far, Crusoe plans to operate on-site natural gas turbines at the Abilene facility totaling 360 megawatts of power. That represents 30% of the data center’s total 1.2 gigawatts of announced capacity.
Although powering data centers with new solar or wind is usually the cheapest option — especially in places like Abilene — building natural gas can be quicker and more reliable, assuming you’re able to acquire the severely backlogged turbines. That’s something Kortlang readily acknowledged to me. “We will see a lot of buildout of natural gas over the last half of this decade, because it’s the easiest thing to controllably build that gets you large amounts of baseload power quickly,” he said.
Kortlang didn’t seem fazed by Crusoe’s announcement this Monday that it’s pursuing a joint venture with the investment firm Engine No. 1, giving the company access to a whopping 4.5 gigawatts of natural gas power. To put that in perspective, there’s only about 25 gigawatts of existing data center capacity in the U.S. today. Schmitt told me this latest announcement is unrelated to the Stargate Project.
Engine No. 1 has secured seven GE Vernova natural gas turbines through a partnership with Chevron announced in January. As Chevron puts it, this joint development will create “scalable, reliable power solutions for United States-based data centers running on U.S. natural gas.” But critically, as Crusoe emphasized, “plans for these data centers include the use of post-combustion carbon capture systems,” which are designed to capture the CO2 from power plants after the fossil fuels are burned, but before they’re released to the atmosphere.
Presumably, these plans will also incorporate either some way to utilize the CO2 in industry or to permanently sequester it underground, though the company hasn’t mentioned anything to this effect. This technology hasn’t been a part of the company’s strategy in the past, though Kortlang told me that Crusoe has been evaluating the viability of carbon capture and storage for as long as G2 has been involved.
Gas-fired power plants paired with carbon capture have never really caught on, simply because they’re pretty much bound to cost more than not building carbon capture. When I asked Kortlang if this meant Crusoe was banking on its data center customers being willing to pay more for greener power, he told me that was “to be determined.” Who exactly was going to design and build the carbon capture technology — Crusoe, Chevron, or another to-be-named project partner — was also “to be determined.” But there’s not actually all that much time to figure it out. In Chevron’s announcement, the company said it was planning to deliver power by the end of 2027.
So, is Crusoe still a climate tech company? The answer seems to be yes — or at least it’s definitely still trying to be.
No other developer has been as diligent about utilizing stranded assets to power data centers. And with its expansion into carbon capture, it certainly seems Crusoe is leaning into an all-of-the-above approach to data center decarbonization. As Dumas told me, “before too long” we’ll also see Crusoe powering its operations with “geothermal, bioenergy, and after that fusion technologies that keep them out ahead of the pack.”
But Crusoe’s business model — and its clean tech bonafides in general — have always relied upon ultimately unprovable counterfactuals. First it was: If this waste gas weren’t powering Bitcoin mining, it would be vented into the atmosphere. That seemed fairly certain, since flaring is common practice in many areas. Now the company is pitching a somewhat fuzzier hypothetical: If this Crusoe data center, powered by some combination of natural gas and stranded renewables, were instead built by another company, it would inevitably be dirtier. Whether or not Crusoe is a boon for the climate ultimately depends upon the degree to which that unquantifiable claim ends up being true.
On Energy Transfer’s legal win, battery storage, and the Cybertruck
Current conditions: Red flag warnings are in place for much of Florida • Spain is bracing for extreme rainfall from Storm Martinho, the fourth named storm in less than two weeks • Today marks the vernal equinox, or the first day of spring.
A jury has ordered Greenpeace to pay more than $660 million in damages to one of the country’s largest fossil fuel infrastructure companies after finding the environmental group liable for defamation, conspiracy, and physical damages at the Dakota Access Pipeline. Greenpeace participated in large protests, some violent and disruptive, at the pipeline in 2016, though it has maintained that its involvement was insignificant and came at the request of the local Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The project eventually went ahead and is operational today, but Texas-based Energy Transfer sued the environmental organization, accusing it of inciting the uprising and encouraging violence. “We should all be concerned about the future of the First Amendment, and lawsuits like this aimed at destroying our rights to peaceful protest and free speech,” said Deepa Padmanabha, senior legal counsel for Greenpeace USA. The group said it plans to appeal.
The Department of Energy yesterday approved a permit for the Calcasieu Pass 2 liquified natural gas terminal in Louisiana, allowing the facility to export to countries without a free trade agreement. The project hasn’t yet been constructed and is still waiting for final approvals from the independent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, but the DOE’s green light means it faces one less hurdle.
CP2 was awaiting DOE’s go-ahead when the Biden administration announced its now notorious pause on approvals for new LNG export facilities. The project’s opponents argue it’s a “carbon bomb.” Analysis from the National Resources Defense Council suggested the greenhouse gases from the project would be equivalent to putting more than 1.85 million additional gas-fueled automobiles on the road, while the Sierra Club found it would amount to about 190 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent annually.
President Trump met with 15 to 20 major oil and gas executives from the American Petroleum Institute at the White House yesterday. This was the president’s first meeting with fossil fuel bosses since his second term began in January. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright were also in the room. Everyone is staying pretty quiet about what exactly was said, but according to Burgum and Wright, the conversation focused heavily on permitting reform and bolstering the grid. Reuters reported that “executives had been expected to express concerns over Trump’s tariffs and stress the industry view that higher oil prices are needed to help meet Trump’s promise to grow domestic production.” Burgum, however, stressed that oil prices didn’t come up in the chat. “Price is set by supply and demand,” he said. “There was nothing we could say in that room that could change that one iota, and so it wasn’t really a topic of discussion.” The price of U.S. crude has dropped 13% since Trump returned to office, according to CNBC, on a combination of recession fears triggered by Trump’s tariffs and rising oil output from OPEC countries.
The U.S. installed 1,250 megawatts of residential battery storage last year, the highest amount ever and nearly 60% more than in 2023, according to a new report from the American Clean Power Association and Wood Mackenzie. Overall, battery storage installations across all sectors hit a new record in 2024 at 12.3 gigawatts of new capacity. Storage is expected to continue to grow next year, but uncertainties around tariffs and tax incentives could slow things down.
China is delaying approval for construction of BYD’s Mexico plant because authorities worry the electric carmaker’s technology could leak into the United States, according to the Financial Times. “The commerce ministry’s biggest concern is Mexico’s proximity to the U.S.,” sources told the FT. As Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer writes, BYD continues to set the global standard for EV innovation, and “American and European carmakers are still struggling to catch up.” This week the company unveiled its new “Super e-Platform,” a new standard electronic base for its vehicles that it says will allow incredibly fast charging — enabling its vehicles to add as much as 249 miles of range in just five minutes.
Tesla has recalled 46,096 Cybertrucks over an exterior trim panel that can fall off and become a road hazard. This is the eighth recall for the truck since it went on sale at the end of 2023.
This fusion startup is ahead of schedule.
Thea Energy, one of the newer entrants into the red-hot fusion energy space, raised $20 million last year as investors took a bet on the physics behind the company’s novel approach to creating magnetic fields. Today, in a paper being submitted for peer review, Thea announced that its theoretical science actually works in the real world. The company’s CEO, Brian Berzin, told me that Thea achieved this milestone “quicker and for less capital than we thought,” something that’s rare in an industry long-mocked for perpetually being 30 years away.
Thea is building a stellarator fusion reactor, which typically looks like a twisted version of the more common donut-shaped tokamak. But as Berzin explained to me, Thea’s stellarator is designed to be simpler to manufacture than the industry standard. “We don’t like high tech stuff,” Berzin told me — a statement that sounds equally anathema to industry norms as the idea of a fusion project running ahead of schedule. “We like stuff that can be stamped and forged and have simple manufacturing processes.”
The company thinks it can achieve simplicity via its artificial intelligence software, which controls the reactor’s magnetic field keeping the unruly plasma at the heart of the fusion reaction confined and stabilized. Unlike typical stellarators, which rely on the ultra-precise manufacturing and installment of dozens of huge, twisted magnets, Thea’s design uses exactly 450 smaller, simpler planar magnets, arranged in the more familiar donut-shaped configuration. These magnets are still able to generate a helical magnetic field — thought to keep the plasma better stabilized than a tokamak — because each magnet is individually controlled via the company’s software, just like “the array of pixels in your computer screen,” Berzin told me.
“We’re able to utilize the control system that we built and very specifically modulate and control each magnet slightly differently,” Berzin explained, allowing Thea to “make those really complicated, really precise magnetic fields that you need for a stellarator, but with simple hardware.”
This should make manufacturing a whole lot easier and cheaper, Berzin told me. If one of Thea’s magnets is mounted somewhat imperfectly, or wear and tear of the power plant slightly shifts its location or degrades its performance over time, Thea’s AI system can automatically compensate. “It then can just tune that magnet slightly differently — it turns that magnet down, it turns the one next to it up, and the magnetic field stays perfect,” Berzin explained. As he told me, a system that relies on hardware precision is generally much more expensive than a system that depends on well-designed software. The idea is that Thea’s magnets can thus be mass manufactured in a way that’s conducive to “a business versus a science project.”
In 2023, Thea published a technical report proving out the physics behind its so-called “planar coil stellarator,” which allowed the company to raise its $20 million Series A last year, led by the climate tech firm Prelude Ventures. To validate the hardware behind its initial concept, Thea built a 3x3 array of magnets, representative of one section of its overall “donut” shaped reactor. This array was then integrated with Thea’s software and brought online towards the end of last year.
The results that Thea announced today were obtained during testing last month, and prove that the company can create and precisely control the complex magnetic field shapes necessary for fusion power. These results will allow the company to raise a Series B in the “next couple of years,” Berzin said. During this time, Thea will be working to scale up manufacturing such that it can progress from making one or two magnets per week to making multiple per day at its New Jersey-based facility.
The company’s engineers are also planning to stress test their AI software, such that it can adapt to a range of issues that could arise after decades of fusion power plant operation. “So we’re going to start breaking hardware in this device over the next month or two,” Berzin told me. “We’re purposely going to mismount a magnet by a centimeter, put it back in and not tell the control system what we did. And then we’re going to purposely short out some of the magnetic coils.” If the system can create a strong, stable magnetic field anyway, this will serve as further proof of concept for Thea’s software-oriented approach to a simplified reactor design.
The company is still years away from producing actual fusion power though. Like many others in the space, Thea hopes to bring fusion electrons to the grid sometime in the 2030s. Maybe this simple hardware, advanced software approach is what will finally do the trick.