Microsoft agrees to buy electricity generated from Sam Altman-backed fusion company Helion in 2028
A view of the end of Helion’s seventh generation prototype, the Polaris.
Photo courtesy Helion
Microsoft said Wednesday it has signed a power purchase agreement with nuclear fusion startup Helion Energy to buy electricity from it in 2028.
The deal is a notable vote of confidence for fusion, which is the way the sun makes power and holds promise of being able to generate nearly unlimited clean power, if it can be harnessed and commercialized on earth. For decades, fusion been lauded as the holy grail of clean energy — tantalizing because it’s limitless and clean, but always just out of reach.
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As responding to climate change has become an increasingly urgent goal for companies and countries around the globe, investors have poured $5 billion into private fusion companies looking to turn that holy grail into electrons flowing through wires.
Microsoft’s agreement to buy electricity from Helion is the first time a fusion company has inked a deal to sell electricity, according to Andrew Holland, the CEO of the Fusion Industry Association.
“This is the first time that I know of that a company has a power purchase agreement signed,” Holland told CNBC. “No one has delivered electricity, and Helion’s goal of 2028 is aggressive, but they have a strong plan for how to get there.”
Helion was founded in 2013 and currently has about 150 employees, with headquarters in Everett, Wash. One of the early and most significant investors in Helion, Sam Altman, is also a founder of OpenAI, the artificial intelligence organization that developed the chat platform ChatGPT, in which Microsoft has invested many billions of dollars. Altman believes the two deals are equally important and correlated components of the future he sees for humanity.
“My vision of the future and why I love these two companies is that if we can drive the cost intelligence and the cost of energy way, way down, the quality of life for all of us will increase incredibly,” Altman told CNBC. “If we can make AI systems more and more powerful for less and less money — same thing we are trying to do with energy at Helion — I view these two projects as spiritually very aligned.”
Samuel H. Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, speaks to media after meeting Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida at the Prime Minister’s office in Tokyo on April 10, 2023.
The Yomiuri Shimbun | AP
If demand for and use of artificial intelligence continues to increase, then that will increase demand for energy, too.
The potential of fusion is “unbelievably huge,” Altman told CNBC. “If we can get this to work — if we can really deliver on the dream of abundant, cheap, safe, clean energy that will transform society. It’s why I’ve been so passionate about this project for so long.”
In 2021, Altman told CNBC he put $375 million into Helion. As of Tuesday, this is still his largest investment ever, Altman told CNBC. In total, Helion has raised raised $577 million.
Why Helion is announcing a 2028 goal now
As part of the power purchase agreement, Helion is expected to have its fusion generation device online by 2028 and to reach its target power generation of 50 megawatts or more within an agreed-upon one-year ramp up period. When the fusion device is fully up to speed producing 50 megawatts of energy, it will be able to power the equivalent of approximately 40,000 homes in Washington state.
While Helion’s deal with Microsoft is to get 50 megawatts online, the company eventually aims to produce a gigawatt of electricity, which is one billion watts, or 20 million times the 50 megawatts it is selling to Microsoft.
Microsoft will pay for the megawatt hours of electricity as Helion delivers them to the grid.
“This is a real PPA, so there’s financial penalties if Helion can’t deliver power. So we’ve really put our skin in the game on this too — that we believe we can deliver this power and are committed to it with our own financial incentives,” David Kirtley, CEO at Helion, told CNBC.
Helion’s co-founders. From left to right: Chris Pihl (CTO), David Kirtley (CEO), George Votroubek (Director of Research).
Photo courtesy Helion
Altman advocated for the two companies to work together, he told CNBC, but the deal is the result of work Helion has done independently. “It was not my doing,” he said.
Microsoft and Helion have been working together for years, Kirtley told CNBC. “The first visit we had from the Microsoft team was probably three of our prototypes ago, so many years ago. And then we’ve been working very closely with their data center technology team here in Redmond,” Kirtley said.
After all, Microsoft needs power and has aggressive climate goals. Microsoft has a goal to have 100% of its electricity consumption, 100% of the time, matched by zero-carbon energy purchases by 2030. Carbon-free energy includes hydro, nuclear and renewables for Microsoft, a Microsoft spokesperson told CNBC.
“We are optimistic that fusion energy can be an important technology to help the world transition to clean energy,” Brad Smith, president at Microsoft, said in a written statement. “Helion’s announcement supports our own long term clean energy goals and will advance the market to establish a new, efficient method for bringing more clean energy to the grid, faster.”
An electrical engineer preparing for a test at Helion.
Photo courtesy Helion
For Helion to be able to deliver electricity generated by fusion to customers requires years of advance planning on the transmission and regulatory fronts.
In that way, announcing a contract now to sell electricity in 2028 gives Helion time to plan and to pick a location in Washington State to put this new fusion device.
“One reason we’re doing the announcement today is that so we can be working with the communities involved, we can be working with regulators, and the power utility on citing this right now,” Kirtley told CNBC. “Even five years is a short amount of time to be hooked up to the grid. And we want to make sure that we can do that.”
Indeed, the transmission system in the United States, meaning the series of wires that carry electricity from where it is generated to where it is used, is largely tapped out. Getting new power generation connected to the grid can take years. Helion is working with Constellation to secure its transmission needs.
‘We’re not here to build systems in a lab’
The best-known pathway to commercializing fusion is with a donut-shaped device called a tokamak. The international fusion project under construction in Southern France called ITER is building a tokamak, and Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a fusion start-up spun out of MIT which has raised more than $2 billion in funding, is using tokamak technology. For comparison, CFS plans to have its first power plant on the grid and selling electricity in the early 2030s.
Helion is not building a tokamak. It is building a long narrow device called a Field Reversed Configuration.
An infographic showing how Helion’s fusion technology works.
Infographic from Helion
Broadly speaking, Helion’s approach involves shooting plasma (the fourth state of matter after solid, liquid and gas) from both ends of the device at a velocity greater than one million miles per hour. The two streams smash into each other, creating a superhot dense plasma, where fusion occurs.
Helion is currently building its seventh-generation fusion machine, named Polaris, which it aims to produce electricity with by next year, Kirtley told CNBC.
“We’re not here to build systems in a lab. We’re here to sell electricity. This is always been the dream,” Altman told CNBC.
So far, Helion has been able to generate energy with its fusion prototypes, but it has not yet built a device that creates more electricity than it uses to run the fusion device. So the firm has a lot of work ahead.
To that, Altman says: “There were a lot of people that were doubting A.I. six months ago, too.”
“Either the technology here is going to work or not. There’s a lot of huge challenges still to figure out — how are we going to get the cost super-low, how are we going to manufacture at scale — but on the ability to actually do the physics, we feel very confident,” Altman told CNBC. “And I think it’s fine for people to doubt it. But also the way that you eventually reduced that doubt is to show to show people it actually works in the commercial setting, like delivering on this deal.”
Helion has been making progress on some key hurdles.
For example, the company has started making its own capacitors, which are sort of like super-efficient batteries and one of Helion’s very significant capital costs.
It has also started to make the very rare fuel it uses, helium three, which is a very rare type of helium with one extra neutron. It used used to get helium-three from the U.S. government strategic reserves.
Next up, Helion has to demonstrate that its devices can work reliably for long periods of time, and Kirtley has a team working on durability of the components used in the device.
If Helion can be successful, it’s going to be a landmark for the entire fusion industry.
“This really signals that a fusion era is coming. And we’re all very excited about it,” Kirtley told CNBC.
In a bold bid to combat the crippling air pollution crisis in its capital, Delhi, Indian lawmakers have begun high-level discussions about a plan to phase out gas and diesel combustion vehicles by 2035 – a move that could cause a seismic shift in the global EV space and provide a cleaner, greener future for India’s capital.
Long considered one of the world’s most polluted capital cities, Indian capital Delhi is taking drastic steps to cut back pollution with a gas and diesel engine ban coming soon – but they want results faster than that. As such, Delhi is starting with a city-wide ban on refueling vehicles more than 15 years old, and it went into effect earlier this week. (!)
“We are installing gadgets at petrol pumps which will identify vehicles older than 15 years, and no fuel will be provided to them,” said Delhi Environment Minister Manjinder Singh Sirsa … but they’re not stopping there. “Additionally, we will intensify scrutiny of heavy vehicles entering Delhi to ensure they meet prescribed environmental standards before being allowed entry.”
Making it prohibitively difficult for Dehli’s residents to own and operate older, presumably more polluting vehicles is one way to reduce harmful emissions and air pollution, but Sirsa’s team isn’t just targeting newer vehicles. They’re also planning to deploy more than 900 electric transit buses, part of a larger plan to replace 5,000 of the city’s 7,500 total bus with lower- or zero-emission options this year alone.
The Economic Times is reporting that discussions are underway to pass laws requiring that all future bus purchases will be required to be electric or “clean fuel” (read: CNG or hydrogen) by the end of this year, with a gas/diesel ban on “three-wheelers and light goods vehicles,” (commercial tuk-tuks and delivery mopeds) potentially coming 2026 to 2027 and a similar ban privately owned and operated cars and bikes coming “between 2030 and 2035.”
Electrek’s Take
After a Chinese government study linked air pollution caused by automotive exhausts and coal-fired power plants to more than 1.1 million deaths per year in 2013, the nation’s government took serious action, shuttering older coal plants and imposing strict emissions standards. The country also incentivized EV adoption through license-plate lotteries favoring electric cars and a nationwide EV mandate set to kick in by 2030.
The results were astounding, and the technological innovations that have come from an entire nation of talented engineers all “pulling in the same direction” have put the West to shame, with Western auto executives repeatedly sounding the alarm and lobbying for tariffs and other protectionist policies on both sides of the Atlantic.
To see India make move towards a gas and diesel ban like this, and on such an aggressive timeline, can only mean that they’ve been paying attention … and America is about to fall even further behind.
SOURCE: India Times; featured image by Sumita Roy Dutta.
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Last week, Parker Hannifin launched what they’re calling the industry’s first certified Mobile Electrification Technology Center to train mobile equipment technicians make the transition from conventional diesel engines to modern electric motors.
The electrification of mobile equipment is opening new doors for construction and engineering companies working in indoor, environmentally sensitive, or noise-regulated urban environments – but it also poses a new set of challenges that, while they mirror some of the challenges internal combustion faced a century ago, aren’t yet fully solved. These go beyond just getting energy to the equipment assets’ batteries, and include the integration of hydraulic implements, electronic controls, and the myriad of upfit accessories that have been developed over the last five decades to operate on 12V power.
At the same time, manufacturers and dealers have to ensure the safety of their technicians, which includes providing comprehensive training on the intricacies of high-voltage electric vehicle repair and maintenance – and that’s where Parker’s new mobile equipment training program comes in, helping to accelerate the shift to EVs.
“We are excited to partner with these outstanding distributors at a higher level. Their commitment to designing innovative mobile electrification systems aligns perfectly with our vision to empower machine manufacturers in reducing their environmental footprint while enhancing operational efficiency,” explains Mark Schoessler, VP of sales for Parker’s Motion Systems Group. “Their expertise in designing mobile electrification systems and their capability to deliver integrated solutions will help to maximize the impact of Parker’s expanding METC network.”
The manufacturing equipment experts at Nott Company were among the first to go through the Parker Hannifin training program, certifying their technicians on Parker’s electric motors, drives, coolers, controllers and control systems.
“We are proud to be recognized for our unwavering dedication to advancing mobile electrification technologies and delivering cutting-edge solutions,” says Nott CEO, Markus Rauchhaus. “This milestone would not have been possible without our incredible partners, customers and the team at Nott Company.”
In addition to Nott, two other North American distributors (Depatie Fluid Power in Portage, Michigan, and Hydradyne in Fort Worth, Texas) have completed the Parker certification.
Electrek’s Take
With the rise of electric equipment assets like Bobcat’s T7X compact track loader and E10e electric excavator that eliminate traditional hydraulics and rely on high-voltage battery systems, specialized electrical systems training is becoming increasingly important. Seasoned, steady hands with decades of diesel and hydraulic systems experience are obsolete, and they’ll need to learn new skills to stay relevant.
Certification programs like Parker’s are working to bridge that skills gap, equipping technicians with the skills to maximize performance while mitigating risks associated with high-voltage systems. Here’s hoping more of these start popping up sooner than later.
SOURCE | IMAGES: Parker Hannifin.
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Based on a Peterbilt 579 commercial semi truck, the ReVolt EREV hybrid electric semi truck promises 40% better fuel economy and more than twice the torque of a conventional, diesel-powered semi. The concept has promise – and now, it has customers.
Austin, Texas-based ReVolt Motors scored its first win with specialist carrier Page Trucking, who’s rolling the dice on five of the Peterbilt 579-based hybrid big rigs — with another order for 15 more of the modified Petes waiting in the wings if the initial five work out.
The deal will see ReVolt’s “dual-power system” put to the test in real-world conditions, pairing its e-axles’ battery-electric torque with up to 1,200 miles of diesel-extended range.
ReVolt Motors team
The ReVolt team starts off with a Peterbilt, then removes the transmission and drive axle, replacing them with a large genhead and batteries. As the big Pete’s diesel engine runs (that’s right, kids – the engine stays in place), it creates electrical energy that’s stored in the trucks’ batteries. Those electrons then flow to the truck’s 670 hp e-axles, putting down a massive, 3500 lb-ft of Earth-moving torque to the ground at 0 rpm.
The result is an electrically-driven semi truck that works like a big BMW i3 or other EREV, and packs enough battery capacity to operate as a ZEV (sorry, ZET) in ports and urban clean zones. And, more importantly, allows over-the-road drivers to hotel for up to 34 hours without idling the engine or requiring a grid connection.
That ability to “hotel” in the cab is incredibly important, especially as the national shortage of semi truck parking continues to worsen and the number of goods shipped across America’s roads continues to increase.
And, because the ReVolt trucks can hotel without the noise and emissions of diesel or the loss of range of pure electric, they can immediately “plug in” to existing long-haul routes without the need to wait for a commercial truck charging infrastructure to materialize.
“Drivers should not have to choose between losing their longtime routes because of changing regulatory environments or losing the truck in which they have already made significant investments,” explains Gus Gardner, ReVolt founder and CEO. “American truckers want their trucks to reflect their identity, and our retrofit technology allows them to continue driving the trucks they love while still making a living.”
If all of that sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve heard of Hyliion.
Hyliion electric semi truck
Before it changed its focus to develop Carnot-cycle generators and gensets, Austin-based Hyliion built a number of EREV Peterbilts using the then-new 15L Cummins diesel as a generator and employing the same sort of battery and e-axle-arrangement as ReVolt.
In addition to being located in the same town and employing the same idea in the same Peterbilt 579 tractor, ReVolt even employs some of the same key players as Hyliion: both the company’s CTO, Chandra Patil, and its Director of Engineering, Blake Witchie, previously worked at Hyliion’s truck works.
Still, Hyliion made their choice when they shut down their truck business. ReVolt seems to have picked up the ball – and their first customer is eager to run with it.
“Our industry is undergoing a major transition, and fleet owners need practical solutions that make financial sense while reducing our environmental impact,” said Dan Titus, CEO of Page Trucking. “ReVolt’s hybrid drivetrain lowers our fuel costs, providing our drivers with a powerful and efficient truck, all without the need for expensive charging infrastructure or worrying about state compliance mandates. The reduced emissions also enable our customers to reduce their Scope 2 emissions.”
Page Trucking has a fleet of approximately 500 trucks in service, serving the agriculture, hazardous materials, and bulk commodities industries throughout Texas. And, if ReVolt’s EREV semis live up to their promise, expect them to operate a lot more than 20 of ’em.
SOURCES | IMAGES: ReVolt; via Power Progress, TTNews.
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