“Fusion Power by 2028? Microsoft Is Betting on It”, 2023-05-10 (; backlinks):
Microsoft inks deal with fusion start-up Helion Energy for electricity on a timeline that would be game-changing, if real. Scientists are skeptical. A Washington state start-up backed by hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital announced Wednesday that it expects to have a fusion power plant built within 5 years, betting on a vastly faster timeline for harnessing the potentially game-changing energy source than most experts think is plausible.
Helion Energy, where AI developer Sam Altman is the board chair and largest investor [which is also his largest investment], signed a contract with tech giant Microsoft in what the firm says is the world’s first power purchase agreement involving fusion energy…Under the agreement, Helion says if it can’t provide the zero-emissions energy promised, it gets penalized. The fusion company declined to specify what those penalties would be or share a copy of the agreement. “This is a real power purchase agreement”, said David Kirtley, Helion’s chief executive. “If we don’t deliver, there will be penalties for us.”…Helion is providing scant details about its power purchase agreement with Microsoft, withholding the price the tech company will pay for the power and the penalties that would fall on Helion if the power, presumably for one of Microsoft’s data centers, is not produced.
Helion has deep ties to Microsoft through its board chair, Sam Altman. Altman’s company, OpenAI, is crucial to the future of Microsoft, after it forged a multibillion-dollar, multi-year artificial intelligence development partnership with the tech giant earlier this year. Helion said in an email that Altman may have been involved in negotiating the fusion power agreement with Microsoft, but the deal has been in the works for years.
…This is not the first time Helion has set an ambitious goal. In 2015, the company said it would have a 50-megawatt pilot plant online within 4 years. That did not happen.
“When we made some of our initial timeline projections, they were based on assumptions of funding that ended up taking longer to secure than we originally thought it would”, Kirtley wrote in an email. He wrote that the company has since built 6 prototype units that “give us great confidence that our timeline is realistic and that we can build the first fusion power plant by 2028.”