""While interstitial milestones are really important to show that the technology works and you can get regulatory approval, at the end of the day, it's about deploying power plants at scale to support the growing power needs," Helion cofounder and CEO David Kirtley told Fortune."
""We're on schedule to still have first electrons to the grid in 2028. It is an aggressive milestone. It's going to be hard," Kirtley said. "Part of that is the progressive iteration and parallel development right now in Malaga, Washington.""
Helion Energy reached a plasma temperature of 150 million degrees Celsius in its seventh-generation Polaris prototype, roughly ten times the core temperature of the sun. The company plans to deliver first electrons to the Washington state grid in 2028 and is building a 50-megawatt commercial plant, Orion, in Malaga near a Microsoft data center. The reactor assembly requires further engineering and design finetuning. Helion pursues parallel development and assembly-line manufacturing, iterating through multiple prototype generations quickly. Skepticism remains about the aggressive timeline, the unique technological approach, and prior scarcity of scientific updates. Regulatory approval and scalable deployment remain essential for meeting growing electricity demand.
Read at Fortune
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]