Insider Brief:
- Google has entered a power purchase agreement to buy 200 MW of fusion power from Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
- Commonwealth Fusion Systems aims to provide this power by the early 2030s.
- Fusion experts tell Climate Insider that this is an unlikely timeline.
Google has signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) to buy 200 megawatts (MW) of nuclear fusion power from Commonwealth Fusion Systems, the companies said in June 30 statements.
Commonwealth said it expects the fusion power will be put on the grid via its inaugural ARC plant in the “early 2030s”.
Google has invested in Commonwealth since 2021.
“By entering into this agreement with CFS, we hope to prove out and scale a promising pathway toward commercial fusion power,” Google’s Head of Advanced Energy Michael Terrell said in a statement.
“We’re excited to make this longer-term bet on a technology with transformative potential to meet the world’s future energy demand, and support CFS [Commonwealth] in their efforts to reach the scientific and engineering milestones needed to get there.”
Commonwealth is equally bullish about their timeline.
“Fusion power is within our grasp thanks in part to forward-thinking partners like Google, a recognized technology pioneer across industries,” Commonwealth co-founder and CEO Bob Mumgaard said in a statement.
“Our strategic deal with Google is the first of many as we move to demonstrate fusion energy from SPARC and then bring our first power plant online. We aim to demonstrate fusion’s ability to provide reliable, abundant, clean energy at the scale needed to unlock economic growth and improve modern living – and enable what will be the largest market transition in history.”
The plant is expected to be built in Virginia in the early 2030s, and expects to be generating fusion energy in the early 2030s as well.
Timeline and Technology
Commonwealth Fusion Technology was launched in 2018, spun out of MIT fusion research. In 2020, it published in Journal of Plasma Physics several peer-reviewed publications indicating its SPARC technology could generate net energy from fusion.
Construction on the SPARC building, a manufacturing facility, and company headquarters began in 2021 – the same year that Commonwealth says it was able to demonstrate “groundbreaking high temperature superconducting magnets” that is required to generate commercial fusion energy.
In 2025, SPARC achieved commercially relevant net energy from fusion, Commonwealth said.
The company will build its first grid-scale commercial fusion power plant at the James River Industrial Park, located in Chesterfield County, Virginia. The company has also made an agreement with local utility Dominion Energy Virginia to provide “non-financial collaboration,” including development and technical expertise and leasing rights to the manufacturing site, which Dominion Energy Virginia owns.
The site is expected to generate 400 MW of electricity, Commonwealth said in a December 2024 statement.
Fusion experts skeptical
“Fusion energy is one of the most promising sources of energy, it’s possible to address all of humanity’s energy needs,” Dr. Mustafa Bashran, physics professor at Ottawa’s Carleton University, told Climate Insider.
“But over the last 40 years, I’ve been hearing a lot of claims and hype,” he said.
Fusion energy has reached a turning point, he said, with promising projects around the world taking never-before-seen steps towards the generation of fusion energy.
“There is momentum now that is finally being achieved, it is going to happen,” he said. “The question is when, and is it going to be commercially viable.”
One of the biggest challenges for nuclear fusion companies is the lack of naturally-occurring tritium, a key material for fusion processes.
“Tritium does not exist in nature,” he said. “Currently, the global stockpile of tritium is less than 25 kilograms. Annual production today is between 100 and 200 grams. If you want to make fusion power that generates 1 gigawatt, you need annually 100 to 200 kilograms of tritium. Where is this tritium going to come from?”
Steven O. Dean, founder of Fusion Power Association and PhD in physics, concurs that the progress made has been substantial.
“It’s no question that great progress has been made, and we’re closer now [to nuclear fusion] than we were before,” he told Climate Insider.
“There’s over 50 of these [fusion] companies now, and there seems to be a new one every day. I have been in fusion now for over 60 years. Back in 1962, I believed fusion could happen in 20 years. But it’s not going to happen in my children’s time. Now I’m hoping that it will happen in my grandchildren’s time.”
Dean does have confidence in Commonwealth’s technology.
“The Commonwealth Fusion people have not yet operated their first experiment, but they spun out of MIT, out of a concept that has 30-40 years of physics demonstrations – so they can be very confident that the experiment that they’re going to have operating in a year or two is going to work.”
However, even if it does work, it can still be a long time before fusion energy can be affordable enough for commercial use, Dr. Bahran said.
In the beginning of working nuclear fusion energy, it will not operate at an economy scale because of the massive investments required to produce the fuel.
“It’s going to take time to reach a level in which a kilowatt hour from fusion is competitive to solar or wind, or even nuclear,” he said.
“Fusion – for now and for the foreseeable future – will be more expensive than nuclear energy.”
