It's Thursday. The hardest problem in fusion right now may not be the plasma. It is whether the 156th copy of a power module costs less than the first.
In today's edition:
🔬 Big Story: Pacific Fusion breaks ground on a net-gain fusion demonstration plant
⚡ Quick Hits: Ford's grid battery, GE Vernova goes medium-voltage, Europe's derated fleet
💰 Capital: Shell sells sonnen and steps back from home storage
📋 Policy Watch: Spain's 80% rule, NRDC's 540 GW warning
The Big Story
Pacific Fusion breaks ground on a net-gain fusion demonstration plant
Pacific Fusion broke ground Tuesday in Albuquerque on a demonstration facility the three-year-old startup says will be the first to produce more energy than it consumes, targeting net facility gain by 2030. The design is pulsed power, or Z-pinch: fast bursts of current compress and heat the fuel magnetically, which the company argues is cheaper than the lasers at Lawrence Livermore, a system Heatmap News notes is roughly 1% efficient. Von Muench told Heatmap that scientific breakeven was never the finish line.
"That's awesome, but not a practical basis for commercial power if you have to store way more energy in the machine than you get into the fuel." Carrie von Muench, co-founder and COO, Pacific Fusion, via Heatmap News, August 25, 2026
The power system is 156 identical, mass-manufacturable modules, shipped, assembled and swapped for repairs, per Heatmap News.
A scaled-down prototype module delivered 440 gigawatts of peak power. Next is a full-scale module above one terawatt, with no date attached.
Funding comes from a $1 billion Series A closed in 2024, led by General Catalyst with Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Patrick Collison and John Doerr. Two of three milestone tranches are unlocked.
A non-binding memorandum with the NNSA would open the machine to stockpile stewardship research.
Source: Heatmap News
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Quick Hits
Technology milestones from across the grid
Five from across the stack, from an automaker's grid battery to a fleet that could not take the heat.
Ford Energy detailed a grid-scale battery product, aiming an automaker's LFP purchasing scale at a market run by dedicated integrators, per Energy-Storage.news. Energy-Storage.news
GE Vernova announced a medium-voltage UPS for data centers, shipping from mid-2027, that strips conversion stages out of gigawatt-class AI campuses. Data Center Dynamics
PG&E added dcbel and Wallbox to its bidirectional EV pilot, which pays homeowners up to $4,500 to enroll an eligible vehicle and charger pair. pv magazine USA
Europe's thermal fleet derated on cooling-water limits during heat and drought while solar and batteries covered the gap, the constraint US planners model on paper. Canary Media
Hitachi Energy committed $300 million to expand transformer and grid component manufacturing in Hefei, Anhui, adding capacity at the bottleneck that paces grid buildout. T&D World
The Capital Stack
Shell sells sonnen and steps back from home storage.
Shell has completed the sale of sonnen, the residential battery and virtual power plant business it bought seven years ago, to TIVEN, Energy-Storage.news reported. Shell said the deal supports our ongoing portfolio high-grading efforts and a focus on parts of the power value chain where it has differentiated capabilities. The timing is awkward. New Jersey, California and Germany are writing rules that assume aggregators will show up to bid, and one of the biggest balance sheets in that business just stepped back.
Source: Energy-Storage.news
Also in the capital stack:
Siemens Energy is selling most of its industrial division to concentrate capital on gas turbines and grid equipment, the higher-margin businesses riding demand for generation and grid gear. Reuters
Princeton NuEnergy secured a $50 million DOE grant toward a $110 million direct-cathode battery recycling plant in Commerce, Georgia, a rare live federal award for battery supply chain. pv magazine USA
Policy Watch
Spain has drafted rules requiring new data center projects of 1 MW or more to source 80% of their power from newly built renewables, exempting operating facilities, with a grace period for projects in development, per Data Center Dynamics. If adopted, siting would follow spare interconnection headroom rather than spare land. Data Center Dynamics
The NRDC projects that current federal energy policy will cost the US 390 to 540 GW of new wind, solar and storage over the next decade, with at most 9 GW of gas added in their place and household rates 4.2% to 5.5% higher by 2035 than in the group's own January 2025 baseline. The modeling is NRDC's own, but it is the number utilities will be asked to rebut. Utility Dive
Ohio siting dockets have filled with fabricated public comments on clean energy projects, and some want verification rules, Canary Media reported. A comment record that cannot be trusted slows every project in the queue. Canary Media
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