Google strikes deal to buy fusion power from MIT spinoff Commonwealth
Alphabet’s Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) said on Monday it has struck a deal to buy power from a project in Virginia fueled by fusion, the reaction that powers the sun and the stars but is not yet commercial on Earth, News.az reports citing CNN.
Google signed what it called the technology’s first direct corporate power purchase agreement with Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a company that spun off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2018.
The deal is for 200 megawatts of power from CFS’ ARC project, which is planned to have a total capacity of 400 MW. The company is developing the project in Virginia, home to the world’s biggest hub of energy-hungry data centers. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed.
Physicists at national laboratories and companies have been trying for decades to use lasers or, in the case of CFS, large magnets to foster fusion reactions, in which light atoms are forced together to release large amounts of energy.
In 2022, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California briefly achieved net energy gain in a fusion experiment using lasers.
But achieving so-called "engineering break-even," in which more energy comes out of a reaction than the overall energy that goes into a fusion plant to get a reaction going, has been elusive. And for a plant to generate power from fusion, the reactions must be constant, not rare.
"Yes, there are some serious physics and engineering challenges that we still have to work through to make it commercially viable and scalable," Michael Terrell, Google’s head of advanced energy, told reporters in a call. "But that’s something that we want to be investing in now to realize that future."
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