Interview with Christofer Mowry of Type One Energy

The last installment in 2025 of The Fusion Report’s interview series with leading fusion companies is our interview with Christofer Mowry, the CEO of Type One Energy. Chris has a long history of executive leadership roles in the global energy industry, including with GE Energy, The Babcock and Wilcox Company (now BWXT), ARC Nuclear LLC, and as CEO of General Fusion. He was also founder and CEO of one of the first nuclear SMR companies, Generation mPower and brings deep experience in power plant design, construction, and operation to Type One Energy.

Chris partnered with Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures (“BEV”) as an “entrepreneur in residence” to build the investment thesis and business strategy for Type One Energy. He was appointed CEO of Type One in February 2023 when BEV launched the company as a venture-backed business with the lead investment in the Seed financing round.

A Strategy of “A Mile Deep and an Inch Wide”

BEV had invested in several fusion companies prior to Type One Energy, including Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Pacific Fusion, and Zap Energy (BEV has recently invested in Xcimer Energy as well). As such, BEV is widely recognized as one of the leading venture capital firms investing in the private fusion energy sector. When BEV considered funding Type One Energy, they liked Chris’s approach of building a fusion technology OEM company, not a firm that would try to become vertically integrated, reinventing how to build and operate grid-scale power plants along the path to commercialization. Instead of a “do everything” model that requires vast amounts of capital over a very long timeframe, Type One Energy’s business model is focused on generating revenues from licensing its engineered design and supplying the fusion systems for its Infinity Two fusion power plant to energy utility end-customers around the world, who would themselves be responsible for construction and operation.

This “mile deep, inch wide” technology pure-play strategy supports Type One Energy’s capital efficient, shortest-possible timeline, and lowest-possible execution risk path to commercialization. It is a path to commercialization which formally ends with the Final Investment Decision (FID) from Type One Energy’s lead customer and start of full-scale project procurement and construction. For Type One Energy, this date was originally targeted for 2029. But the global energy market’s demand for clean, safe, reliable power and the geopolitics of energy combined to pull that date forward to September 2025, when the US’s largest public energy utility, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), issued Type One Energy the world’s first a Letter of Intent (LOI) and initial project engineering contract for a fusion power plant project. TVA wants to build and operate one or more fusion power plants at TVA’s Bull Run site in eastern Tennessee using Type One Energy’s stellarator technology. With this first contract from TVA, Type One Energy began crossing the threshold to “growth stage” more than 3 years early. Importantly, this relationship with TVA is not an aspirational PPA off-take agreement or MOU which might deliver revenues to Type One Energy many years in the future, but rather establishes the company as a revenue generating business today as a fusion OEM company.

When Will Fusion Put Power On The Grid, and From What Country?

Type One Energy anticipates fusion energy will start powering the electricity grid in the early 2030s from TVA’s first Infinity Two power plant at Bull Run in eastern Tennessee. From Type One Energy’s perspective, the “sweet spot” in output from the first generation fusion power plants is about 350 MWe. This net electrical output from Infinity Two results from the detailed optimization study which the company performed over the  past few years to balance all the key performance requirements, both economically and technically, needed for a commercially viable fusion power plant. The results of this landmark study were peer-reviewed and published as a series of 7 scientific papers in a special issue of the prestigious Journal of Plasma Physics (JPP) in early 2025. JPP subsequently issued an unusual press release stating that these peer-reviewed papers “outlined, for the first time, a unified, comprehensive, implementable and realistic physics basis for a fusion power plant… setting the gold standard for how this is done…”

The 350MWe size of Infinity Two, together with its supporting technical features, allow it to be built using today’s best available materials and fundamental technologies, while still delivering operational up-time (the power plant’s “Capacity Factor”), maintenance schedules, construction logistics, and costs that are compelling to energy utilities like TVA. Collectively, these attributes support TVA’s desire to begin construction of their Infinity Two fusion power plant at Bull Run as early as 2028, subject to completion of all project development activities and final approvals from key stakeholders.

The size of Infinity One was also strategically set to enable deployment at energy utility “brownfield sites” where utilities have retired power generation assets. These brownfield sites come with the incredibly valuable pre-existing electricity grid connection, land, and water rights – all necessary for any new power plant project to be delivered. TVA’s Bull Run site is just such a brownfield location, with the retired Bull Run Fossil Plant offering the grid connection and water rights perfectly sized for one or more Infinity Two plants. TVA’s current desire to start construction of Infinity Two at Bull Run in 2028 will make it one of the world leaders in the race to build the first commercially viable, grid-scale, fusion power plant.

Meanwhile, the global energy industry’s interest in accelerating deployment of first-generation fusion power plants is heating up. China is placing a huge strategic bet on fusion, investing billions into the rapid development of tokamak-style fusion machines, while the EU is expected to announce a similarly aggressive push to bring this technology to commercial reality. The German government has recently stated its intentions to support several national fusion public-private partnerships aimed at commercial deployment in the 2030s. The UK has also launched its strategy for engaging industry in building fusion power plants.

Those projects which most effectively chart a realistic technology development path, manage execution risk effectively, and succeed in attracting the necessary project financing from public and private sources will be the new leaders in the future of energy. It is too early to call the winners in this global race for energy dominance.

What Else Should People Know About Type One?

Type One Energy is a global business, with the company locating its offices and facilities where they see opportunities for technology and business collaboration and where the sources of talent are located to grow and deliver on its mission. The company has three locations in the US, one in the UK, one in Australia, and one in Canada. The company’s technical leaders have been at the epicenter of conceiving, building, and testing most of the world’s stellarators over the past 20 years, from the first quasi-symmetric stellarator (HSX) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to the W7-X experiment at IPP in Greifswald, Germany. With its core technical leadership in place, Type One Energy’s new employees are generally engineers and physicists that are guiding the design of the Infinity Two fusion machine.

Overall, the company’s biggest differentiators are its depth of technical and industry experience designing and building fusion machines and commercial power plants, its access to key enabling technologies like superconducting magnets and exascale supercomputers, together with its relentless focus on managing execution risk and remaining capital efficient. These differentiators coalesce around Type One Energy’s “mile deep, inch wide” strategy of becoming a fusion technology OEM business.