It’s a lot of work to invent a new source of energy and even more to build an industry. But the strategic partnership that Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) announced with Google today is fast-tracking that progress by helping to pull fusion power onto the electrical grid to meet our early 2030s plan. Google and CFS are sending a demand signal now to catalyze the commercial fusion market.
Here are the parts of the deal that make this partnership such a monumental moment for CFS:
- Google has become our first customer by signing the largest fusion power purchase agreement in history for 200 megawatts (MW) — half the electrical power output from our first ARC power plant in Chesterfield County, Virginia.
- Google is making a new investment in CFS on top of its participation in our 2021 fundraising effort. That’ll provide funds to help us develop ARC, showing that customers have a stake in ensuring the products that meet their needs get developed and built.
- As part of this strategic partnership, Google has an option beyond the first ARC to procure power from future plants, sending a strong signal that the world should prepare for fusion at scale.
This Google partnership is a very strong signal that the world wants fusion. What we’re making has good product-market fit, as the business gurus tracking new technology say. Fusion is desirable and needed, and organizations are willing to pay for it to happen.
There’s no doubt humanity needs new power. Analyst firm McKinsey forecasts electricity consumption will increase about 2.5x through 2050 — a breakneck pace for the massive energy industry. There are multiple demand growth drivers: new industry, economic growth, electric vehicles, air conditioning, and new computing technology like AI. With this direct offtake agreement, we put fusion into the mix for discussions on the future of electricity.
I’ve studied the history of technology closely, and I’ve seen moments like this before when powerful forces align to bring a new industry into existence. Steam engines enabled the Industrial Revolution, while more recently Silicon Valley allies have delivered innovations like computers, smartphones, and the internet. We expect fusion’s abundant, safe, clean, secure, and affordable energy will be as big a deal — the last new power source humanity will ever need.
Accelerating large-scale fusion energy
This agreement is possible because Google supports our vision for bringing fusion power to the grid at scale. It’s our plan for the first ARC to begin generating power in the early 2030s. That’s just our first step. We founded CFS with a vision to build thousands more power plants, and we’re building our company to reach that scale and achieve that impact.
That scaling work includes establishing partnerships with national labs and universities to improve fusion energy, standing up a supply chain that can supply high-temperature superconductors and other fusion energy necessities, and helping to establish regulations appropriate for our technology.
Google’s vision makes it a superb partner for CFS’ scaling plans. The company’s farsighted efforts have fostered new clean energy sources: investing in companies, collaborations with market commitments. It’s poetic to repeat this process with fusion.
I’d also like to thank our Commercial and Corporate Development teams, Chief Commercial Officer Rick Needham and many others at CFS and Google for their work to put this deal together. These types of partnerships take time to form, and many different hands to steer and find common ground.
Fusion energy basics
If you’re tuning in for the first time, here’s a little background on fusion. It’s the physical process that powers the stars, with smaller atoms like hydrogen combining and releasing energy as they form bigger atoms like helium. CFS is bringing that process to Earth using a machine called a tokamak that can reproduce the intense conditions required for fusion and capture its energy. We’re now building our first tokamak, called SPARC, a commercially relevant system that’ll prove out most of the technology we’ll need for our ARC power plants.
Here’s what we believe makes fusion so good for the grid and for customers:
- Fusion energy will be steady, working 24×7, regardless of daily or seasonal weather changes.
- It’s clean, with no pollutants or greenhouse gases.
- It’s safe and compact, enabling location flexibility so power plants can fit where power demand is high and minimize the need for new transmission lines.
- It’s scalable and ultimately affordable, built in a modular and repeatable way that rapidly lowers key component costs
- Abundant and widely available fuel that enables long-lasting energy security that doesn’t depend on complex global supply chains
ARCs are designed to generate 400 megawatts of power, about what a natural gas plant supplies. That’s enough to power about 280,000 average US homes.
The CFS path to widespread ARC fusion power plants
Here’s how we see this future shaping up:
- Right now, we’re building our first fusion machine, SPARC, at our headquarters in Devens, Massachusetts. It’s designed to reach a key fusion milestone in 2027 called net fusion energy, denoted in scientific circles as Q>1. That means generating more power from fusion than it takes to start and sustain the process. We expect SPARC to be the first commercially relevant Q>1 demonstration.
- SPARC proves out most of the systems in ARC. Although SPARC will generate fusion power, it’s ARC that’s designed to turn that power into electricity on the grid starting in the early 2030s in Virginia.
- We’re planning to build several more ARC power plants after that first. That’s the next major step in scaling up our manufacturing and operations.
- Ultimately we expect to bring thousands of ARC power plants to the grid.
It’s a bold ambition, but we’ve been pursuing it since day 1 and making steady progress since then from R&D toward commercialization. We’re happy Google is a partner in this vision.
