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It’s aiming to put fusion energy on the grid by the mid-2030s.
The fusion world is flush in cash and hype, as the dream of near-limitless clean energy inches closer to reality. A recent report from the Fusion Industry Association found that in the last two years, companies in the industry have brought in over $2.3 billion, nearly a third of all fusion funding since 1992.
Today, one of those companies, Type One Energy, announced a giant, $82.5 million seed funding round, which CEO Chris Mowry told me is “one of the largest, if not the largest ever, seed financings in the history of energy.” This funding represents the total from the company’s first close in March of last year, which brought in $29 million, plus the recent close of its extension round, which brought in an additional $53.5 million. The extension was co-led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, New Zealand-based venture capital firm GD1, and Centaurus Capital.
Mowry said the follow-on funding is necessary for the company to achieve its target of commercializing fusion by the mid-2030s. “To do this, we need to ramp this company up pretty quickly and have some pretty ambitious milestones in terms of development of the actual pilot power plant. And that takes a lot of capital,” he told me.
Type One uses a reactor design known as a stellarator. The concept is similar to the more familiar doughnut-shaped tokamak reactors, used by the deep-pocketed MIT-spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Systems and the intergovernmental fusion megaproject ITER. Both stellarators and tokamaks use high-powered magnets to confine superheated plasma, in which the fusion reaction takes place. But unlike the symmetrical magnetic field created by a tokamak, a stellarator creates a twisted magnetic field that is more adept at keeping the plasma stabilized, though historically at the expense of keeping it maximally hot.
Recent progress in the stellarator universe has Mowry excited, as the world’s largest stellarator, developed at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Germany, has demonstrated high heating power as well as the ability to maintain a fusion plasma for a prolonged period of time. Thus, he told me this tech has “no fundamental science or engineering barriers to commercialization,” and that if the German stellarator were simply scaled up, it could likely provide sustained fusion energy for a power plant, albeit at a price point that would be totally unfeasible. Commercialization is therefore now simply an “engineering optimization challenge.”
The Type One team is composed of some of the world’s foremost experts on stellarator fusion, coming from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which Mowry said “built the world’s first modern stellarator;” Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and the Institute for Plasma Physics. The company plans to use the additional funding to jumpstart its FusionDirect program, which involves building a prototype reactor in partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest public utility. The timeline is aggressive — Type One is aiming to complete the prototype by the end of 2028. And while this machine will not generate fusion energy, its purpose is to validate the design concept for the company’s pilot plant, which will ideally begin putting fusion electrons on the grid by the mid-2030s.
Mowry’s goal is to enter into a public-private partnership by the end of the decade that will help get the company’s first-of-its-kind stellarator pilot off the ground. The government has an integral role to play in helping fusion energy reach scale, he argued, but said that as of now, it’s not doing nearly enough. Federal funding for fusion, he told me, is “on the order of a billion dollars a year.” While that might seem like a hefty sum, Mowry said only a minuscule portion is allotted to commercialization initiatives as opposed to basic research and development, a breakdown “aligned with where fusion was in the 20th century,” he told me, not where it is today.
If Type One’s pilot plant works as hoped, “then you’re talking about deploying the first wave of full-scale, truly commercial fusion power plants in the second half of the 2030s.” Which, when it comes to preventing catastrophic climate change, is “maybe just in time.”
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The nonprofit laid off 36 employees, or 28% of its headcount.
The Trump administration’s funding freeze has hit the leading electrification nonprofit Rewiring America, which announced Thursday that it will be cutting its workforce by 28%, or 36 employees. In a letter to the team, the organization’s cofounder and CEO Ari Matusiak placed the blame squarely on the Trump administration’s attempts to claw back billions in funding allocated through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.
“The volatility we face is not something we created: it is being directed at us,” Matusiak wrote in his public letter to employees. Along with a group of four other housing, climate, and community organizations, collectively known as Power Forward Communities, Rewiring America was the recipient of a $2 billion GGRF grant last April to help decarbonize American homes.
Now, the future of that funding is being held up in court. GGRF funds have been frozen since mid-February as Lee Zeldin’s Environmental Protection Agency has tried to rescind $20 billion of the program’s $27 billion total funding, an effort that a federal judge blocked in March. While that judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, called the EPA’s actions “arbitrary and capricious,” for now the money remains locked up in a Citibank account. This has wreaked havoc on organizations such as Rewiring America, which structured projects and staffing decisions around the grants.
“Since February, we have been unable to access our competitively and lawfully awarded grant dollars,” Matusiak wrote in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. “We have been the subject of baseless and defamatory attacks. We are facing purposeful volatility designed to prevent us from fulfilling our obligations and from delivering lower energy costs and cheaper electricity to millions of American households across the country.”
Matusiak wrote that while “Rewiring America is not going anywhere,” the organization is planning to address said volatility by tightening its focus on working with states to lower electricity costs, building a digital marketplace for households to access electric upgrades, and courting investment from third parties such as hyperscale cloud service providers, utilities, and manufacturers. Matusiak also said Rewiring America will be restructured “into a tighter formation,” such that it can continue to operate even if the GGRF funding never comes through.
Power Forward Communities is also continuing to fight for its money in court. Right there with it are the Climate United Fund and the Coalition for Green Capital, which were awarded nearly $7 billion and $5 billion, respectively, through the GGRF.
What specific teams within Rewiring America are being hit by these layoffs isn’t yet clear, though presumably everyone let go has already been notified. As the announcement went live Thursday afternoon, it stated that employees “will receive an email within the next few minutes informing you of whether your role has been impacted.”
“These are volatile and challenging times,” Matusiak wrote on LinkedIn. “It remains on all of us to create a better world we can all share. More so than ever.”
A battle ostensibly over endangered shrimp in Kentucky
A national park is fighting a large-scale solar farm over potential impacts to an endangered shrimp – what appears to be the first real instance of a federal entity fighting a solar project under the Trump administration.
At issue is Geenex Solar’s 100-megawatt Wood Duck solar project in Barren County, Kentucky, which would be sited in the watershed of Mammoth Cave National Park. In a letter sent to Kentucky power regulators in April, park superintendent Barclay Trimble claimed the National Park Service is opposing the project because Geenex did not sufficiently answer questions about “irreversible harm” it could potentially pose to an endangered shrimp that lives in “cave streams fed by surface water from this solar project.”
Trimble wrote these frustrations boiled after “multiple attempts to have a dialogue” with Geenex “over the past several months” about whether battery storage would exist at the site, what sorts of batteries would be used, and to what extent leak prevention would be considered in development of the Wood Duck project.
“The NPS is choosing to speak out in opposition of this project and requesting the board to consider environmental protection of these endangered species when debating the merits of this project,” stated the letter. “We look forward to working with the Board to ensure clean water in our national park for the safety of protection of endangered species.”
On first blush, this letter looks like normal government environmental stewardship. It’s true the cave shrimp’s population decline is likely the result of pollution into these streams, according to NPS data. And it was written by career officials at the National Park Service, not political personnel.
But there’s a few things that are odd about this situation and there’s reason to believe this may be the start of a shift in federal policy direction towards a more critical view of solar energy’s environmental impacts.
First off, Geenex has told local media that batteries are not part of the project and that “several voicemails have been exchanged” between the company and representatives of the national park, a sign that the company and the park have not directly spoken on this matter. That’s nothing like the sort of communication breakdown described in the letter. Then there’s a few things about this letter that ring strange, including the fact Fish and Wildlife Service – not the Park Service – ordinarily weighs in on endangered species impacts, and there’s a contradiction in referencing the Endangered Species Act at a time when the Trump administration is trying to significantly pare back application of the statute in the name of a faster permitting process. All of this reminds me of the Trump administration’s attempts to supposedly protect endangered whales by stopping offshore wind projects.
I don’t know whether this solar farm’s construction will indeed impact wildlife in the surrounding area. Perhaps it may. But the letter strikes me as fascinating regardless, given the myriad other ways federal agencies – including the Park Service – are standing down from stringent environmental protection enforcement under Trump 2.0.
Notably, I reviewed the other public comments filed against the project and they cite a litany of other reasons – but also state that because the county itself has no local zoning ordinance, there’s no way for local residents or municipalities opposed to the project to really stop it. Heatmap Pro predicts that local residents would be particularly sensitive to projects taking up farmland and — you guessed it — harming wildlife.
Barren County is in the process of developing a restrictive ordinance in the wake of this project, but it won’t apply to Wood Duck. So opponents’ best shot at stopping this project – which will otherwise be online as soon as next year – might be relying on the Park Service to intervene.
And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Dukes County, Massachusetts – The Supreme Court for the second time declined to take up a legal challenge to the Vineyard Wind offshore project, indicating that anti-wind activists' efforts to go directly to the high court have run aground.
2. Brooklyn/Staten Island, New York – The battery backlash in the NYC boroughs is getting louder – and stranger – by the day.
3. Baltimore County, Maryland – It’s Ben Carson vs. the farmer near Baltimore, as a solar project proposed on the former Housing and Urban Development secretary’s land is coming under fire from his neighbors.
4. Mecklenburg County, Virginia – Landowners in this part of Virginia have reportedly received fake “good neighbor agreement” letters claiming to be from solar developer Longroad Energy, offering large sums of cash to people neighboring the potential project.
5. York County, South Carolina – Silfab Solar is now in a bitter public brawl with researchers at the University of South Carolina after they released a report claiming that a proposed solar manufacturing plant poses a significant public risk in the event of a chemical emissions release.
6. Jefferson Davis County, Mississippi – Apex Clean Energy’s Bluestone Solar project was just approved by the Mississippi Public Service Commission with no objections against the project.
7. Plaquemine Parish, Louisiana – NextEra’s Coastal Prairie solar project got an earful from locals in this parish that sits within the Baton Rouge metro area, indicating little has changed since the project was first proposed two years ago.
8. Huntington County, Indiana – Well it turns out Heatmap’s Most At-Risk Projects of the Energy Transition has been right again: the Paddlefish solar project has now been indefinitely blocked by this county under a new moratorium on the project area in tandem with a new restrictive land use ordinance on solar development overall.
9. Albany County, Wyoming – The Rail Tie wind farm is back in the news again, as county regulators say landowners feel misled by Repsol, the project’s developer.
10. Klickitat County, Washington – Cypress Creek Renewables is on a lucky streak with a solar project near Goldendale, Washington, getting to bypass local opposition from the nearby Yakama Nation.
11. Pinal County, Arizona – A large utility-scale NextEra solar farm has been rejected by this county’s Board of Supervisors.