Can the power of a star lower our electric bills?

Electric bills are rising. AI data centers are gobbling up power. In Everett, two fusion companies are racing to invent the world’s first economically viable nuclear fusion reactor. And investors are opening up their wallets to fund it.

If you’ve ever tried to blow-dry your hair and use the microwave at the same time in an old house with knob and tube wiring, you know what can happen. The lights flicker. The breaker trips.

That is basically the U.S. electric grid right now. We’re plugging in electric cars, heat pumps, and massive AI data centers, and we’re doing it all at once. The grid can’t handle the load.

Experts expect demand for electricity in the Pacific Northwest to grow 30% over the next 10 years. We’re running out of capacity to generate more power.

Higher demand and limited supply leads to higher electric bills. Seattle City Light expects rates to increase 7-10% every year for the next 4-6 years. A lot of that will pay for new power sources and grid upgrades.

But big tech isn’t waiting. It’s betting on a solution straight out of science fiction: nuclear fusion. It’s the same reaction that lights up the sun, and it’s all happening right here, in the rainy Pacific Northwest.

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The Holy Grail

Fusion is different from the nuclear power you typically hear about. That old stuff is called fission.

Fission makes energy by breaking atoms apart. It creates radioactive waste that stays deadly for 24,000 years. For context, 24,000 years ago humans were still nomadic hunter-gatherers.

Fusion creates energy by smashing atoms together. It is cleaner. It produces waste, but that waste only remains dangerous for about 12 years.

"It truly could be the one size fits all universal holy grail energy solution that helps us clean up our planet," said Amy Jasper, who works for Zap Energy.

Zap is one of two major fusion companies operating just 30 miles north of Seattle, in Everett.

The Everett cluster

Zap Energy and a company called Helion are practically next door to each other in Everett.

They operate out of nondescript warehouses. Driving by, you might think they were full of Amazon packages. But inside, they look like something from a steampunk novel.

Giant metal cylinders are held together by bolts. Bundles of pipes full of gases and cables are everywhere.

Inside those cylinders, the companies are making plasma, practicing parts of the fusion process, and recording the results to make their reactors better and better.

Plasma isn’t easy to contain – that’s been one of the major obstacles until recently.

Think of plasma as the fourth state of matter. You have solid, liquid, gas, and plasma.

In plasma, individual atoms get stripped of their identity and become a hot soup of electrons and nuclei. It’s like when you cook bean soup too long and end up with mush.

The reactors crush hydrogen gas into this plasma mush using magnets or lasers or controlled lightning. This plasma is then further compressed to induce fusion.

In that plasma soup, the hydrogen atoms get confused. They combine all wrong. They fuse into something new... helium.

It’s like if two people went into a room together and came out as one, bigger person. That process releases a massive amount of energy. Zap and Helion have different ways of capturing that energy.

Helion uses electromagnetic waves, which absorb the energy as electricity and send that off to storage. It’s not unlike in a science fiction movie, when a fighter’s personal force field absorbs the power of a blaster pulse.

Zap captures the energy as heat in a chocolate fountain of liquid metal. The heat can boil water, and the resulting steam can drive turbines, generating electricity.

Another reason these fusion companies are in Everett is because the University of Washington is in Seattle. One of Helion's founders is a former researcher at the University of Washington. Zap energy relies on technology developed at the UW.

Everett is not the only cluster

There are other clusters of fusion research around the world, gathered around universities and government labs — Princeton, MIT, a government lab in California.

But Helion CEO David Kirtley says the greater Seattle area – especially the Everett/Marysville area – is the perfect place to build a fusion industry.

"This area has just an absolutely perfect mix of engineering technicians, machinists, just the right amount of workforce with the right experience," Kirtley said. "So that they can come to Helion and then we can train them into being fusion experts."

Helion is currently hiring dozens of workers, from physicists to accountants. It’s brought on workers from the aerospace industry and electric vehicle manufacturing. It’s even hired people from bike shops. "Folks that have hands-on experience building hardware, building electronics, doing the electronic routing of cables, those kinds of things,” Kirtley said.

Over at Zap, engineer Zosia Toth says the cutting-edge nature of the work has all her friends talking. “I honestly think a lot of them are kind of jealous,” said Toth. “They’re like, ‘Man, you get to do something super cool.’”

Why Now?

We’ve heard promises about fusion for a long time. Scientists have understood the physics for decades.

But something is different now.

First, the technology is better. We have better semiconductors, stronger magnets, and faster computer chips, for example.

Second, the money is there. Investors have poured $1.4 billion into Zap and Helion alone, according to Pitchbook. They include people like Bill Gates, Sam Altman of OpenAI, and companies like Microsoft. They’re writing the checks because they want massive amounts of power for the Artificial Intelligence systems they’re invested in. They need a source that doesn’t rely on the shaky public grid.

Industrial companies like Nucor Steel are also writing checks.

A dose of skepticism

Scott Montgomery teaches energy policy at the University of Washington. He said he views fusion with a mixture of optimism and skepticism.

On the one hand, the radioactive waste that comes from fusion is less dangerous than that from fission, he says.

"I'm not sure you'd want to make a toy out of it and put it in the bathtub with your toddler," he said. "But it is still waste and something has to be done with it. I might bury it in my backyard for a little while. You know, not too deeply, but that would probably work."

On the other hand, Montgomery is skeptical about the timing. Helion says they are about three years away from being commercially viable. Montgomery isn't buying it.

"We understand that there has to be a promotional dimension to this," he said. "What I see is that a lot of these time projections are aimed at investors who prefer a 5-to-10-year schedule."

Montgomery doesn’t expect commercial viability until 10-15 years from now. And he doesn’t expect it to lower our energy bills until 2050 -- the soonest he can imagine widespread adoption.

The Bottom Line

If this works, don't expect your electric bill to drop tomorrow.

The first customers for this power will be the tech giants. Microsoft has already spoken for all the power coming out of Helion’s first plant.

But Bhuvana Srinivasan, a plasma physics professor at the University of Washington, says the science is real.

"Fusion is at the stage of a mature science experiment," Srinivasan said. "The discoveries that have happened recently have told us that we have a path. We know we can do it."

Even if Microsoft takes all the power at first, it still helps. Every data center that builds its own power source is a data center that isn't sucking up juice from the public grid.

It might not lower your bill, but it could prevent it from rising as quickly.

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