It's Thursday. One fusion lab's parts list includes magnets pulled out of retired MRI scanners and insulators cut from glass beer bottles. The temperatures came out real anyway.
In today's edition:
🔬 Big Story: a cut price path to fusion breakeven
⚡ Quick Hits: batteries at California's peak, solar robots, a Romanian gigawatt hour
💰 Capital: Entergy's Fair Share Plus rate
📋 Policy Watch: California's data center laws, eight states sue over wind leases
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The Big Story
Terra Fusion bets a simpler mirror machine can reach breakeven
Baltimore based Terra Fusion detailed TFEC-1, successor to the Centrifugal Mirror Fusion Experiment it runs at the University of Maryland, IEEE Spectrum reported. CMFX operates today on 3 tesla magnets salvaged from Philips medical MRI scanners, with modified glass beer bottles as insulators. TFEC-1 is specified at 10 tesla and ten times CMFX's voltage, with scientific breakeven targeted for 2029. It is still in development.
"With only a few megawatts of power input, we were getting similar [temperature] results to the Livermore tokamak with hundreds of megawatts." Carlos Romero-Talamas, CEO, Terra Fusion
ARPA-E put $5.2 million into the work in 2020.
Jason Cassibry of the University of Alabama in Huntsville told the magazine the scaling "suggests that confinement and stability will persist all the way up to breakeven."
Derek Sutherland, chief science officer at rival mirror developer Realta Fusion, said of the centrifugal approach, "That thing's going to get chewed up in a power plant."
Source: IEEE Spectrum
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Quick Hits
Technology milestones from across the grid
Five from across the stack.
RMI found grid batteries supplied 13% to 19% of California's total generation at 2024 peak demand and 6% to 9% during ERCOT's tightest hours in 2025, avoiding more than $29 million in California peak energy costs. It projects 30% annual deployment growth over five years. Utility Dive
Equans Solar & Storage will put up to ten technologies through a three year, AU$25 million ARENA backed trial, among them an autonomous inspection robot from California's Nextpower, to cut solar operating costs. RenewEconomy
CATL will supply a 918 MWh battery system in Romania, with roughly 500 MWh of further projects advancing elsewhere in central and eastern Europe. Energy-Storage.news
Entergy filed a complaint against MISO over $70 million in Joint Targeted Interconnection Queue upgrade costs assigned to its Lone Star plant, a test of how the region splits the bill for shared interconnection work. RTO Insider
Ontario Power Generation awarded Candu Energy and Aecon a $1.7 billion, three year contract to retube Pickering Unit 5, the first phase of keeping about 2,000 MW of CANDU capacity running into the 2060s. Power Engineering
The Capital Stack
Entergy's Fair Share Plus rate puts $2.1 billion behind an Arkansas data center
Google has committed more than $2.1 billion over 20 years under an Entergy rate structure called Fair Share Plus, pv magazine USA reported, including $526 million toward the 600 MW Cypress Solar project and $190 million toward transmission upgrades, supporting a $4 billion data center campus in West Memphis, Arkansas. Entergy projects $1.1 billion in net benefit to other ratepayers over the term, a figure Arkansas consumer advocates have questioned. The structure prices one very large customer's grid costs into its own tariff rather than the general rate base.
Source: pv magazine USA
Also in the capital stack:
Fervo Energy won two Department of Energy awards worth about $20 million to test high temperature enhanced geothermal in Elmore County, Idaho and appraise a prospect in Humboldt County, Nevada, according to the company. GlobeNewswire
Breakthrough Energy named 21 startups to its sixth Fellows cohort, pitched at a forecast tripling of electricity demand and including fusion developers Borealis Fusion and StarWarden. No amounts were disclosed. TechCrunch
Policy Watch
Governor Gavin Newsom signed a seven bill package on California data centers this week, Data Center Dynamics reported. SB 886 directs the California Public Utilities Commission to create rate classes for facilities of 25 MW and above so they carry their own connection and electricity costs. SB 887 removes the industry's blanket environmental review exemption while fast tracking projects that meet state water and energy standards, and the thresholds are left to the CPUC. Data Center Dynamics
FERC declined to let ComEd cancel a transmission security agreement backing PowerHouse Hillwood's proposed 1.8 GW, $20 billion data center campus in Joliet, Illinois, which the developer had secured with a $1 letter of credit, sending the dispute toward federal court. At issue is how much credit support a utility can demand from a large load before building for it. Utility Dive
Eight states led by New York filed three more lawsuits challenging the federal government's offshore wind lease buyouts, deepening the legal overhang on Atlantic coast timelines. RTO Insider
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