The dream of producing clean and limitless energy has seemed like a plot from a science fiction movie for some time. Today, it looks like those plots may look more like fact than fiction. Microsoft is putting its bets on a company called Helion Energy, which claims they are close to making a commercial nuclear fusion power plant.
Helion announced today an agreement with Microsoft, which will enable the company to be the first customer for Helion"s fusion plant. The press release did not state the specific financial terms of this new agreement. It says:
The plant is expected to be online by 2028 and will target power generation of 50 MW or greater after a 1-year ramp up period. The planned operational date for this first of its kind facility is significantly sooner than typical projections for deployment of commercial fusion power.
In 2020, Microsoft announced that the company planned to be "carbon negative" by 2030. If Helion can stick to its schedule and offer Microsoft energy from its fusion plant in 2028, that would go a long way toward Microsoft achieving that goal.
Helion Energy has already built six working prototypes of its fusion reactor, and a seventh prototype is in the works to go online sometime in 2024. Its method uses what"s called a plasma accelerator to heat its fuel up to 100 million degrees Celsius. The reactor then uses powerful magnetic fields to compress the plasma created by the accelerator to achieve nuclear fusion.