Editor-in-Chief, The Fusion Report
US grid-scale BESS capacity is now 45 GW, and California alone added 16.9 GW since 2018. Lithium-ion still leads, riding the EV cost curve, but sodium-ion, vanadium redox flow, and iron-air batteries each have a distinct play in stationary storage. Each technology fits a different point on the duration, safety, and cost curves.
Thea Energy has successfully operated its first full-size, full-current, full-field stellarator planar shaping coil at over 6 T and 20 K, hitting Eos-spec performance. The milestone validates the company’s software-controlled magnet approach and its in-house build in Kearny, NJ, where a second facility is planned for 2026 to scale shaping coil production.
Bob Mumgaard, CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, said fusion needs to hit $50/MWh to succeed. But US wholesale prices swing from $24 to $260/MWh by region, Europe and Japan run $95 to $100/MWh. AI data centers paying behind the meter face $150 to $300/MWh. $50/MWh is a goal, not a requirement. The real bar is facility Q>10.
Type One Energy, Tokamak Energy, and AECOM have formed the UK Infinity Fusion Consortium, a private-sector-led effort to build a 400 MWe stellarator-based fusion power plant in the United Kingdom by 2034. The plant is the second to use Type One Energy’s stellarator design and the second fusion plant announced for the UK, after the STEP tokamak.
Zap Energy is becoming an integrated nuclear platform, pairing its sheared-flow-stabilized Z-pinch fusion machine with a 10 to 15 MW sodium-cooled microreactor on the fission side. The company also named Zabrina Johal as CEO. The Fusion Report sat down with Zap’s Ryan Umstattd to unpack the strategy, the funding picture, and the technology overlap.
In the finale of The Fusion Report’s Decathlon series, we hand out the medals. Sort of. Events 8 (funding) and 9 (regulation) are essentially complete. Events 1 and 2 (plasma performance and drivers) sit at the halfway mark, with KSTAR, EAST, JET, Polaris, and SPARC closing in. Events 3 through 6 are barely underway. No clear winner yet.
Japan’s Helical Fusion closed its Series B at JPY 2.7 billion ($17M US), bringing total funding to roughly JPY 9.8 billion ($61.4M US). The company also launched the Helix Program Official Partners with three founding industrial collaborators: NICHIAS, Hasetora Spinning, and Seno Kisen. Manufacturing for the Helix HARUKA demonstration magnets is now underway.
Part 4 of The Fusion Report’s Decathlon series covers three more magnetic confinement approaches. Z-pinch machines run massive currents through plasma. Field-reversed configurations form self-stabilizing plasma rings. Magnetic mirrors trap plasma in open-ended bottles. Meet the companies betting on each: Zap Energy, Helion, TAE Technologies, Realta Fusion and more.
The UK’s Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP) program has awarded Tokamak Energy a £70M ($95M) contract to build high-temperature superconductor (HTS) magnets for its prototype fusion power plant. The deal puts Tokamak Energy alongside Commonwealth Fusion Systems as a premier magnetics vendor, and signals the UK’s commitment to a sovereign fusion supply chain.
The third installment of The Fusion Decathlon series turns to magnetic fusion energy (MFE) solutions. The article traces the 75-year arc of tokamak development from the Soviet T-1 to ITER and Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ SPARC, then examines stellarators from Germany’s record-setting W7-X to commercial ventures by Type One Energy, Proxima Fusion, Thea Energy, and Renaissance Fusion.
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