With fusion, our oceans contain enough energy for billions of years. Fusion is the future of the global energy sector — the near future. And it will be the cheapest reliable power, and incidentally, the cleanest power too. 4 ways the private sector can empower utility resilience amid severe climate risks The heat and pressure cause expansion but any contact with the reactor walls instantly cools it and halts the fusion reaction.
In the past, the biggest hurdle to actually getting a heat pump has been cost. During the summer, the process can be reversed, moving heat out of the house in order to cool it. The home-heating chaos makes it abundantly clear that the inefficient and highly polluting systems we have need to be relegated to the past. This rather tiny difference in mass drives a tremendous release of energy. Fusion is the process that powers the sun and the stars. Meanwhile, the space economy is expected to reach $1.8 trillion by 2035 as space-enabled technologies advance.
The case for fusion energy
One day in the early 2030s, an engineer at a newly constructed power plant near Richmond, Virginia, in the United States, will press a button. What will it take to achieve net-positive AI energy by 2030? Bringing you weekly curated insights and analysis on the global issues that matter. Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses. CFS aims to bring its first grid-scale fusion plant online in the early 2030s and has already secured off-take agreements from Google and Eni, the latter valued at more than $1 billion.
Small modular reactors
No single technology will solve the energy crisis on its own; it will take a mix of solutions. The World Economic Forum’s Centre for Energy and Materials is driving the transition to a “fit for 2050” energy system. Investors are pouring money into these advanced nuclear technologies, and they’re progressing quickly. Some claim they can reduce the time it takes for waste to decay from half a million years to less than 500 years. Innovative start-ups are developing ways to shrink the volume and toxicity of nuclear waste. But even with its small footprint, waste remains a key concern for the public, as it can take thousands of years to decay.
The renaissance of the stellarator – what it means for fusion energy
The transition to nuclear fusion in the coming decade could provide just that. A nuclear fusion reactor fusion markets in South Korea has set a new record, superheating a plasma loop to 100 million degrees Celsius for 48 seconds. Organic, sustainable food powered by fusion energy, harvested when it’s ripe and sold at an accessible price point, could offer another ripple effect of increased enthusiasm for eating tastier fresh foods and better health.
How can these technologies advance the energy transition?
Within electric vehicles, there’s an energy ecosystem that needs improvement to make electric vehicles a more viable choice for everyone too. Under the fusion-powered grow lights, hydroponically grown strawberries or lettuce or other crops can be grown to maturity without the use of pesticides and other harsh chemicals. Reshoring manufacturing from Asia and overseas to the US already cuts down on emissions both from shipping and production (for example, Chinese factories often rely on coal-fired power plants). Factories could, for example, be located closer to the raw materials they rely on — or to the retail markets that goods are destined for — cutting down on transportation costs and carbon emissions. More recently, factories still need some proximity to high-wattage transmission lines that can supply large quantities of electricity. As technology developed in the early 1800s, turbine systems could power mills of all sorts.
General Fusion in Canada, Helion Energy in the United States and others are investigating new approaches to fusion energy. Different approaches to fusion energy are being pursued – from cold fusion, which still lacks evidence and may never work, to inertial fusion, which could work, to magnetic fusion, which really does work. On Earth we need to create similar conditions and hold a hot electrically-charged plasma at high enough pressure for long enough for fusion reactions to occur. Fusion energy projects and start-ups around the world may pursue the goal of fusion energy in different ways by playing to their distinctive strengths. According to The Global Fusion Industry in 2022 report, 93% of companies believe that fusion electricity will be on the grid in the 2030s or before (up from 83% in 2021). While the research on tokamaks surged globally, a handful of projects kept exploring the stellarator design.
The analysis highlights fusion’s potential to add trillions of dollars to global gross domestic product as demand for clean electricity surges. The global pursuit of fusion energy – a potentially safe, abundant, zero-carbon power source – has entered a decisive phase, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). At the same time, the Forum is also working to support a more integrated approach to energy solutions, including advanced nuclear, clean fuels, hydrogen and carbon removal. The amount of waste is relatively small because nuclear fuel is very dense and very little of it is required to produce immense amounts of electricity. Fusion mimics the process that powers the sun, creating massive energy without carbon emissions or long-lasting radioactive waste. While nuclear fusion is often dubbed as the holy grail of energy, it is also in the early stages of realization.
Heat pumps are already gathering momentum
Modelling the impact of fusion power — which has been compared to the discovery of fire and called “the last energy source humanity will ever need” — is challenging. DeepMind is also developing an AI pilot to control magnetic configurations, optimize fusion power and manage heat load for CFS’s SPARC reactor outside Boston. Fusion, the process that powers the sun and stars, promises nearly limitless energy without carbon emissions or long-lived waste, which has excited scientists since the 1950s. It helps increase public confidence in advanced energy solutions, technology readiness, demand and business cases while enabling collaborations and informing policy.
Energy Transition
Even in a drought, when freshwater supplies are scarce, it’s not cost-effective to run most desal plants because of energy costs. One problem was that the process, which usually involves distilling seawater multiple times until all the salt is removed, uses an incredible amount of energy. At Davos in 2023, Kim Budil, the lab’s director, explained the experiment involved beaming 192 lasers on a tiny target and heating it to create a self-sustaining reaction. In December 2022, scientists at the lab managed to produce more energy from the reaction than it consumed – a net gain of 1.5 megajoules in less time than it takes light to travel one inch. Globally, government labs and companies are racing to generate power from fusion – including at the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Thanks to its success in advancing fusion technology, it operated for 40 years before entering decommissioning in October 2023.
- One showed for the first time that it is feasible to build a low power (~100MWe) tokamak with a high power gain.
- The JET lab, once the world’s largest and most advanced fusion reactor, began its pioneering experiments in 1983.
- The 10 countries that score the highest in terms of readiness account for only 2.6% of global annual emissions.
- Nuclear fusion, the process that powers the Sun and stars, merges two atomic nuclei into a larger one, releasing energy.
- On average, the waste from a reactor supplying a person’s electricity needs for a year would be about the size of a brick.
- The Fostering Effective Energy Transition 2024 report showed that after a decade of progress, the global energy transition has plateaued amid the global energy crisis and geopolitical volatilities.
- 4 ways the private sector can empower utility resilience amid severe climate risks
- “Our laser was not built for energy generation, it was built as a backbone of a national security programme. If we want to take this forward, public-private partnerships are going to be essential. If I look at the private-sector fusion companies that have already been spun out, they have needs for expertise and certain specific skills that it would be cost prohibitive to develop within a start-up framework. So they can partner with the laboratories to get access to that capability and expertise. In the inertial confinement fusion space, it’s essential.
- With academic partners at the Swiss Plasma Center at EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), Google showed that deep reinforcement learning can control the magnets of a tokamak to stabilize complex plasma shapes.
- Fusion energy is arguably the most exciting human discovery since fire.
- How financial regulators are using technology to protect consumers and strengthen the financial system
As more cities follow San Francisco and San Jose in banning gas hookups for new construction, heat pumps will be the de facto replacement system. In the rural northeast, heat pumps, in combination with rooftop solar, are increasingly common, moving residents away from burning fuel and firewood. Right up against the arctic circle in Norway, nearly two thirds of homes rely on heat pumps to stay warm, and just over 40% have them in Sweden and Finland. But, as widespread adoption in Scandinavia over the last ten to fifteen years has shown, heat pumps can operate in frigid temperatures. A house-wide system costs about $10,000.
How AI will help get fusion from lab to grid by the 2030s
Platforms like the Forum’s Advanced Energy Solutions community can help speed up this cooperation and accelerate the deployment of new technologies from decades to years, such as clean fuels and hydrogen, advanced nuclear, storage and carbon removal. The Fostering Effective Energy Transition 2024 report showed that after a decade of progress, the global energy transition has plateaued amid the global energy crisis and geopolitical volatilities. How is the World Economic Forum facilitating the transition to clean energy? But bringing them to market will require new policies and regulations, and the nuclear industry must win public trust by addressing concerns over cost, safety, and waste. On average, the waste from a reactor supplying a person’s electricity needs for a year would be about the size of a brick.
In addition, fast neutron reactors can utilize spent fuel from existing power plants and provide a sustainable solution to the issue of waste. They use fission technology, so they’re not as frontier as fusion, but they’re closer to becoming a reality. Small modular reactors (SMRs) are another promising area of advanced nuclear energy. According to the US Department of Energy, fusion reactions are hard to sustain due to the extreme heat and pressure needed to fuse atoms.
Future of the Environment
After confirming these initial results, the PPPL decided in 1969 to move from the stellarator to a tokamak design – an important decision followed by other scientists working on fusion projects worldwide. The resurgence of the electric vehicle could prove similar to another source of innovation, this time in fusion science. The global race for commercial fusion is on while the fusion-powered future is just beginning. The jump from fossil fuels to fusion energy will inevitably be more profound than the jump from burning wood to burning fossil fuels.
Digital power system transformation ‘essential’ – and more top energy stories How AI can accelerate the energy transition, rather than compete with it In New York City, heat pumps are becoming common in new developments, and a new programme will start introducing them into the city’s public housing this winter, which has long-standing problems with broken furnaces and inadequate heat. The technology still needs to overcome the common misconception that heat pumps can’t hack it anywhere that experiences true winter. Despite doing all the work of central heating and cooling, heat pumps use far less energy than an oil burner or HVAC systems.