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Google has agreed to purchase power from a planned fusion power plant in the 2030s in only the second electricity offtake deal to be signed in the nascent fusion energy sector.
The technology giant has committed to buy 200 megawatts of electricity from Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ planned power station in Virgina under a multiyear power purchase agreement, the companies said in a statement on Monday.
US-headquartered CFS, which raised a record $1.8bn from investors including Google in 2021, hopes the proposed 400MW facility will be the first fusion power station to be connected to the grid.
Scientists have sought to produce clean energy by combining atoms since the 1950s but in decades of experiments no group has been able to produce more energy from a fusion reaction than the system itself consumes.
CFS is arguably the most advanced of a few dozen privately held fusion companies racing to perfect the technology and develop a commercially viable machine.
It is currently building a demonstration plant in Massachusetts which it aims to turn on in 2027. It hopes the plant that would supply Google will be ready by the early 2030s.
”[This is] not just a plant with some date made up or some thin document,” CFS chief executive and co-founder Bob Mumgaard told the Financial Times, referring to the power purchase agreement. “This is a full PPA,” he said, adding: “We make power, and they’re obligated to buy it.”
The deal comes as technology companies including Google, owned by Alphabet, compete to lock in access to electricity to supply the massive roll out of data centres required to power AI systems.
Microsoft signed a power purchase agreement in 2023 with Sam Altman’s fusion company Helion, agreeing to offtake electricity from a proposed 50MW facility that the companies said at the time would be online by 2028.
The promise of fusion is particularly tantalising as the reaction produces no long-lived nuclear waster, emits no carbon and a small cup of the hydrogen isotopes used in the reaction has the potential to power a house for hundreds of years. Yet sceptics continue to argue that commercial fusion power remains decades away.
Mumgaard said the support from Google was a signal to the investment community and the supply chain that commercial fusion power was increasingly likely, adding that the deal would help the company to raise financing.
Google has agreed to increase its investment in CFS in the next funding round and also signed an option to offtake from other CFS power plants in the future, the companies said.
“We’re excited to make this longer-term bet on a technology with transformative potential to meet the world’s future energy demand,” Michael Terrell, Google’s head of advanced energy, said in a statement.
