Five years apart, what will be the rate?

There's a lot of very intricate engineering involved.

I've had the honor of contouring your factory.

And the thing that stunned me was the engineering, the depth and the extraordinary precision of the engineering.

Yeah.

So our goal, we have, I think, an audacious but realistic goal of we would like by the by 2050 to be able to have deployed roughly 10,000 power plants around the world.

And that is a it's that's an audacious goal, and 10,000 is a very large number.

But there's there's two things behind that.

One of them is that 10,000 is the number of plants that you really need.

If you, if you say you're serious, you know, lots of people talk about having climate goals in the 2050s.

If you're really serious about doing that and you want to have firm power, so power that doesn't rely on the sun being up or the wind blowing or anything like that.

This is fusion would be firm power, um, similar to the the type of like if you have a coal power plant, the coal power plant can be on all the time.

Same with the fusion power plant, it will be able to be on all the time.

Uh and you uh that's that's roughly 10,000 of these is what it will take in order to replace the current generation that we have and replace it with uh totally clean and safe uh form of energy.

And actually, if you look back at the adoption curves of the so the second point is if you look back at the adoption curves of technology like solar, and you even mentioned fission, um, you know, before uh, you know, before there were there were some accidents that happened in fission power plants, the rate of adoption of fission was extremely, extremely fast.

And if you if you match, if you get around that rate, you could actually, and you and you start in the early 2030s, you can actually see a path to get from building a few plants a year to building close to you know, you know, hundreds to maybe even a thousand plants a year by the time you get to 2050 and be uh replacing most of the world's firm energy generation with fusion.

What would be the share of under ideal circumstances in 2050 that uh fusion would be producing?

Uh you could you could potentially be providing somewhere um, you know, somewhere around 20% of the world's total energy requirements.

And if you look at just electricity, it's actually a much, much higher number than that.

If it's you would start with electricity, but you can actually you you can think about using fusion power plants to do things like you know, like produce uh green hydrogen, for example, you know, different types of of fuels that could be used to transport things around, as well as just electricity.

Um fusion power plants are very, very good at making electricity, but they also make heat.

Um, they make pretty high grade process heat.

And so it's that's why we we don't just talk about electricity, we talk about total energy.

And so we see fusion as actually a complement to renewables, where you know, we we would still like to see people often ask, oh, are you know competition with solar or competition with wind?

And I say, no, it's it's um, you know, I I think I think it was it was maybe President Obama.

Um, there was a you know, all of the above quote that he had about what's it going to take to solve climate change?

The answer is all of the above.

And I firmly believe that that that is the answer.

And I think fusion can be a very, very important piece of that because it has this baseload aspect.

And you could sort of, if you if you take the wedge of firm power that's being produced by things like oil and and natural gas and coal, you could replace that entire wedge by 2050 of firm power uh with fusion power plants.

Well, not alone in the market.

Other companies are offering or plan to offer or hope to offer fusion power plants in the fairly near future.

One of them, one of your, I think, competitors, Helian, has signed a contract with Microsoft, a power purchase contract.

You have a power purchase contract with a utility.

So this is quite far along.

Uh, how many competitors do you have and how close do you believe they are?

So we we actually don't have we we don't have a a power purchase agreement with a utility right now, although we are talking to a lot of people.

We're we're talking to, you know, we're looking forward to the future and and and want to, you know, and want to set up commercial contracts in the future.

Uh I would say we there's a roughly uh the number actually keeps growing, which I think is great.

There's there's roughly 40 or so fusion companies that are out there, all you know, uh all trying sort of different methods of trying to confine a star inside of some kind of bottle.

And right now, I would say the the thing that differentiates us from a lot of the other efforts is that the what I mentioned before, the science of what we're doing is very sort of rigorously proven.

The fact that eater, the world's governments are putting tens of billions of dollars into eater, um, you know, governments generally don't like to give money away.

And the fact that there are there's tens of billions of dollars that have gone into eater, I think is really a statement of conviction that people really trust the science.

If you go out into the peer-reviewed literature and say, you know, what is what is the the um what is sort of the confinement strategy that's going to work, people talk about this device call a tokamak.

And so our strategy and the thing that we've used as a differentiator is like you mentioned Lou Ellen is really in the engineering.

So building these magnets was not you know out of the gate it was that was not like an easy task.

And that was actually the first the very first very large milestone in our company that we spent the first three years of our company doing was developing this magnet technology, which is really a feat of engineering.

It's not, it's not develop, you know, it's not coming up with any fundamentally new physics or trying to extrapolate many orders of magnitude out you know in in regimes it it's very very hard engineering challenge, but people are clever and we have a lot of very very smart, very talented engineers at our company who've managed to overcome the engineering challenges that come with building these very, very strong magnets.

I guess you know there's no such thing as a free lunch.

And so the thing that we had to um in order to get the benefit of using this physics which is very well proven we had to pay the price in the engineering of building the magnets and so that's why you know to earlier you'd ask how much money we raised before so the the roughly $2 billion that we've raised most of that was in our Series B, which was in 2021.

And the big milestone that unlocked I would say 90% of that $2 billion was the demonstration that we had that are of our magnet technology or the magnet technology work.

Before that if you went out into the plasma physics community and you asked you know somebody who wasn't associated with us would they work people said oh the physics is you know the physics will work we totally you know that we've they've published we we really like to publish um as even which may be weird for uh sort of a commercial company but we're very science based and we think that it's very important that the scientific community is also on board with what we're doing and you know we're not just making things up and so we publish a lot and if you went and asked somebody in the community before 2021 you know what's this the chances of Commonwealth fusion succeeding the answer that a lot of people gave is the physics oh the physics is you know they're actually not not extrapolating very much in the physics at all but the engineering I don't know if they're going to get the magnets to work.

And that's why the 2021 milestone that we had of actually showing that the magnet work was such an important um was such an important piece of the company to to unlock that next step which was to build a whole factory to build a bunch of these magnets which is what you saw Lou Alan.

I'd like to ask you quickly uh what is your relationship to MIT?

What is the relationship of your company and your technology to the Massachusetts Institute of technology.

Yeah MIT holds a very special place in my heart.

So I got my PhD uh in in fusion there and actually our company store sort of spun out of MIT.

So all of the founders of Commonwealth fusion systems actually were previously at a lab at MIT called the Plasma Science and Fusion Center.

And we realized at it's a very long that that's a very long story but at the short version of the story is at some point we realized that the work that we were doing was really great but in order to take it to the next level we actually had to start a commercial company that could bring in the amount of capital that was required to take this to the next level and do all of the engineering and all of sort