Type One Energy Group Receives Award from U.S. Department of Energy to Advance its Stellarator Fusion Energy System

May 29th, the U.S. Department of Energy announced Type One Energy Group was been selected to receive additional investment from the new Milestone-Based Fusion Development program. The total opportunity invests $46 million into eight companies and furthers the Administration’s commitment to a pilot-scale demonstration of fusion within a decade. This award will support Type One Energy Group’s FusionDirect efforts to deliver a power-producing stellarator power plant to the grid.

Type One Energy Group’s proposal for “The High-Field Stellarator Path to Commercial Fusion Energy” was crafted by David Anderson, Vice President for Systems Engineering. Before joining Type One, Anderson pioneered concepts of quasi-symmetry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and led the development and operation of the Helically Symmetric eXperiment (HSX) in the 1990s.

“Type One Energy’s technical foundations provide a powerful springboard to achieve its mission,” stated Christofer Mowry, Type One Energy’s recently-appointed CEO. “We now have a team that brings concentrated experience from renowned fusion science institutions, including the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Germany and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as well as veteran business leaders from the energy sector. Our partnership approach paves the way for stellarator technology to be commercialized.”

This represents the company’s second federal award. In 2019, the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program selected Type One for a cooperative research grant to complete the proof of concept for its magnets. “Our team has demonstrated that HTS cable windings for a stellarator design maintain the needed tolerances and superconducting-current properties with a small three-dimensional bend,” explains Anderson. “Our new milestones allow follow-on efforts to build a prototype non-planar HTS magnet coil to enable a stellarator development path to lower-cost fusion energy.”

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