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Helion Energy Will Provide Microsoft With Fusion Power Starting in 2028

upstart writes:

Helion Energy will provide Microsoft with fusion power starting in 2028:

Helion, the clean energy company with its eye firmly on the fusion prize, announced a couple of years ago that it had secured $2.2 billion of funding to help it develop cleaner, safer energy at a commercial scale in November 2021. Today, it is starting to reap the fruits of its labor, announcing an agreement to provide Microsoft with electricity from its first fusion power plant, with Constellation serving as the power marketer and managing the transmission for the project.

Fusion has been the energy goal for over 60 years, as it produces next to no waste or radioactivity while processing and is far less risky than fission. But achieving the same process that occurs in stars has proved mighty difficult to contain, with it taking more energy to keep the reaction under control than it can generate. Progress has been slow and steady, with the potential rewards keeping companies such as Helion focused on the reaction. Helion has been working on its fusion technology for over a decade. To date, it has built six working prototypes and it expects its seventh prototype to demonstrate the ability to produce energy in 2024.

With this in mind, Helion's plant is expected to be online by 2028 and has a power generation target of 50MW, or greater, with a one-year ramp-up period. While that might seem a long way into the future still, it's significantly sooner than the projections had suggested.

"This collaboration represents a significant milestone for Helion and the fusion industry as a whole," said David Kirtley, CEO at Helion, in a statement to TechCrunch. "We are grateful for the support of a visionary company like Microsoft. We still have a lot of work to do, but we are confident in our ability to deliver the world's first fusion power facility."

This Startup Says its First Fusion Plant is Five Years Away. Experts Doubt It.

upstart writes:

Helion, backed by OpenAI's Sam Altman, has already lined up Microsoft as its first customer:

A startup backed by Sam Altman says it's on track to flip on the world's first fusion power plant in five years, dramatically shortening the timeline to a carbon-free energy source that's eluded scientists for three-quarters of a century.

Helion Energy's announcement that it's on the verge of commercializing the process that powers the sun is an astounding claim—and a questionable one, according to several nuclear experts. That's mainly because the company hasn't said and won't comment on whether it's passed the first big test for fusion: getting more energy out of the process than it takes to drive it.

[...] Nevertheless, the 10-year-old company, which is based in Everett, Washington, has already lined up its first customer for the planned commercial facility, striking a power purchase agreement with the software giant Microsoft. Helion expects that the plant will be built somewhere in the state of Washington, go online in 2028, and reach its full generating capacity of at least 50 megawatts within a year.

[...] Other fusion startups are aiming to begin operating power plants in the early 2030s, and plenty of observers think even those timelines are overly optimistic.

Unless Helion has made some major advances that most organizations would have trumpeted, the company still faces a series of very difficult technical tasks, says Jessica Lovering, executive director of Good Energy Collective, a policy research group that advocates for the use of nuclear energy.

[...] "The truth is fusion is hard, and new power plants are hard, and first-of-a-kind anythings are also hard," he says. "It's one reason we're trying to get out in front and trying to solve all those problems today."

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