In June, Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced the first customer for the electricity from our ARC fusion power plant. Now hot on the heels of that comes our second customer, Italian energy company Eni, in a deal worth more than $1 billion.
Three things are notable here.
- Momentum: In just three months, we’ve signed up two separate customers for now more than half of the 400 megawatts of power that our first ARC plant will generate.
- Confidence in our approach: Both Google and Eni are not just early customers for our ARC power plants, but also earlier investors that returned to participate in our latest $863 million Series B2 funding round.
- Customer diversity: These fusion power customers are two very different companies. Google is a hyperscaler — a tech leader that operates a network of data centers packed with cloud computing and AI hardware. Eni, an integrated energy company based in Italy that’s one of the largest in the world, has a different, more industrial perspective that also values fusion’s enormous potential.
Clearly the market wants what we have to offer: not just all the benefits of clean firm fusion energy, but also the capabilities we’ve built at CFS to deliver it at grid scale.
That’s good news, because fusion is an ideal energy source — not only because it’s clean and firm, but because it’s safe, dispatchable, secure, with abundant fuel and power plants that can be built just about anywhere. At CFS, we’re incredibly motivated to get this fusion power onto the grid, at scale, as soon as possible, not just for the benefit of our business but for the benefit of everybody on the planet. This new deal with Eni helps secure that future for fusion energy.
Proving our fusion technology, step by step
It may seem strange to sell electricity today from a power plant that’ll start putting watts on the grid in the early 2030s using technology that hasn’t been proven to work commercially. But CFS has built a track record of executing and achieving key milestones, which Eni, Google, and our other investors know well.
Our approach begins with peer-reviewed research on the best scientifically understood type of fusion machine, the tokamak, and the high-temperature superconducting magnets we use to drastically improve that machine. Applying that research, we then design, build, and test the critical pieces of our technology. For example, our 2021 TFMC and 2024 CSMC magnet prototypes proved both our hardware and the computer simulations we use to help design it.
That work leads to SPARC, the tokamak we’re building now at our headquarters in Devens, Massachusetts. SPARC will demonstrate net fusion energy — more power out than in, called Q>1 in scientific circles — for the first time in a commercially relevant machine.
Developing and building SPARC has shown our capabilities when it comes to validating our fusion technology, choosing a site, obtaining permits, engaging state and local community members, running a factory, and overseeing construction.
SPARC proves out most of the technology inside ARC, but part of our new Series B2 funding will go toward work developing other systems for ARC in parallel with SPARC. It’s all part of our methodical, carefully planned path from prototype to production — from SPARC to ARC.
All that diligent planning, designing, developing, building, and testing is what makes our commercialization efforts possible. It’s why we were able to select an ARC site in Chesterfield County, Virginia; to sign a joint development agreement with Dominion Energy, the local utility, to help put ARC onto the grid; to obtain the country’s first zoning approval to build a fusion power plant — and now to sell ARC’s power to a second customer.
Why buy fusion power?
Fusion — the same process that powers the sun — is the ultimate source of energy. And while the universe decided billions of years ago it’s the most energy dense form of power, it hasn’t yet been harnessed on earth. When it is harnessed, it can check all the boxes for customers who need electricity.
Fusion fuel is abundant, and our ARC power plant needs very little. It’s sometimes hard to fathom how efficiently fusion turns fuel into energy, but in short, a single truck could ship in all the fuel an ARC plant needs for its full lifetime. No pipelines, no liquified natural gas terminals at port cities, no train cars filled with coal, no global supply chain that can affect the availability and price of fusion power. Energy comes from a machine you buy instead of natural resources you extract. That’ll help make fusion power affordable, accessible, and an improvement to energy security around the world.
It’s clean, with no greenhouse gas emissions, and it’s firm, meaning it can be generated when customers need it. So it has the benefits of fossil fuels, able to turn on when needed, as well as renewables, providing power with no emissions. It can become the primary source of baseload power, making an excellent complement to solar and wind. And the availability of this firm, clean power can dramatically lower the overall cost of the energy transition away from fossil fuels.
It’s safe. As opposed to nuclear fission, the fusion process isn’t a chain reaction and cannot result in some runaway reaction or meltdown. Rather, the fusion reaction only happens under very specific conditions. It’s not easy to create those conditions, so the reaction simply stops if disturbed.
Because of this inherent safety in the reaction, fusion power plants are regulated like particle accelerators and can be deployed quickly and located flexibly, including near where power demand is highest. That reduces the need for massive transmission line construction.
For all of these reasons, fusion power can be the ideal power source for all electricity customers — from large industrial and commercial users to utilities that serve millions of residential customers. And with electricity demand growing fast, fusion may be arriving just when it’s needed most, letting us build a scalable sustainable power system far into the future. It’s for this reason that many customers whose businesses rely on access to lots of electricity are keenly interested in tapping into the first fusion power plants. They also know that by signing up now they’re positioning themselves to be long-term customers for what could be a key enabler for their future operations.
We’ve set up CFS from day one to meet that customer demand at scale. We look forward to working with all our customers and commercialization partners to deliver it — and to deliver it as quickly as possible.
