Daring or Dumb? Google Makes a Deal for Fusion Power.

Fusion power, that revolutionary, highest-density power source that's always 20, 30, or 40 years away, is still drawing attention - and causing some companies to make some bets on the success of some fusion power startups. The latest is Google, which has made a deal with Virginia-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems to meet Google's ever-increasing demand for electricity.

It's an interesting, if risky, move.

Google has struck a deal to buy 200 megawatts of fusion power, as the tech giant struggles to reach its sustainability goals in the face of the growing energy demands of artificial intelligence (AI).
The company announced Monday that it is partnering with Commonwealth Fusion Systems to offtake power from its first commercial plant in Virginia, which is set to bring 400 megawatts of power online starting in the early 2030s.
“Fusion holds huge potential as an energy source of the future: it’s clean, abundant and inherently safe, and it can be built just about anywhere,” Michael Terrell, Google’s head of advanced energy, wrote in a blog post.
“Commercializing fusion is immensely challenging, and success is not guaranteed,” he continued. “But if it works, it could change the world by providing a more secure and clean energy future.”

Fusion is, or would be, all of the things that Mr. Terrell claims, if it can be made to work on any scale. That's still far from assured; we may well still be 20, 30, or 40 years away. Maybe not, though; Commonwealth Fusion Systems is more optimistic. I reported on their progress last December:

At that time, I wrote:

Fusion promises cheap, abundant power, and solves the energy-density problem that advocates of wind and solar alternatives don't seem to know how to deal with. But does Commonwealth have a practical reactor design?
The company has already created the world’s “strongest high-temperature superconducting magnet,” integral to the development of commercial fusion energy. It is working on a smaller-scale test version of ARC called SPARC. SPARC will be the world’s first “commercially relevant fusion energy machine” to produce net energy, or “more energy from fusion than it needs to power the process.”
SPARC is expected to produce net power in 2027, and ARC “is expected to deliver power to the grid in the early 2030s.”

If they can do this, then Google may have its foot in the door in the greatest energy breakthrough since fission reactors - maybe since fire. Fusion has the potential to change a lot of things, if the bugs can be worked out of it. Google isn't the only tech company hedging its bets like this; Microsoft, in 2023, made a similar deal with Helion Energy to buy part of the output of their commercial fusion plant, supposedly going online in 2028. That's only three years away.

Color me skeptical.

Google is hedging still further, though; they have also made a deal with a company called Kairos Power to build small modular fission reactors to power Google's data centers and AI servers directly. That seems a safer idea, especially given the breakthroughs in fission reactors we've seen lately.

Nuclear power, be it fission or fusion, will be part of tomorrow's energy picture. American tech companies are already making that very plain. If the people playing with fusion reactors can make them work, great. If they can't, that's fine, too; the new fission reactors will still work.

If one of these companies can make a workable, production-scale fusion reactor, that would be a big, big, big, big deal. But I suspect we're still 20 years off. Or 30. Or 40.

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