(Foothill Ranch, CA / Lucerne) TAE Technologies, the world’s largest private fusion energy company, has announced a landmark fusion technology milestone by producing stable plasma at 50M+ degrees Celsius in a proprietary compact reactor design that can scale to competitive fusion-generated power.
This milestone furthers confidence in TAE’s path to commercialization, and has aided the companyin raising $280Min additional funding.When combined with prior rounds,TAE has now raised over $880M from some of the world’smost sophisticated investors.
The latest financingis the direct result of TAE achieving its most recent scientific milestoneon the path to delivering carbon-free baseload energy from the Hydrogen-Boron (aka H-B11 or p-B11) fuel cycle, the most abundant and environmentally friendlyfuel source on Earth, capableof sustaining the planet for millennia.
This success crucially confirms a key differentiator of TAE’spatented technology: a positive relationship between plasma confinement and reactor temperature, meaning that the company’s compact linear configuration improves plasma confinement as temperatures rise. By generating such stable high temperature plasmas, TAE has now validated that the company’s unique approach can scale to the conditions necessary for an economically viable commercial fusion power plant by the end of the decade.
A portion of the capitalwill be used to initiatedevelopment of a demonstration facilitycalled “Copernicus” that will operate well in excess of 100 million degrees Celsius to simulate net energy production from the conventional Deuterium-Tritium (D-T) fuel cycle. Copernicus will provide opportunities for TAE to license its technology for D-T fusion,while scaling to its ultimategoal utilizing p-B11.
Use of proceeds will also go to rapid commercialization of TAE’s revolutionary Power Management technology, born out of the power delivery systems for its fusion projects. This technology will be used to extend range, efficiency, and faster charging of electric vehicles, as well as for deployment in residential, commercial, industrial, and utility-scale electrical grid applications.
The continuing deliveryof these scientific results has propelled TAE to bring in fundingwith accelerated velocity, including over $130M raised just this year.Broad global supporthas come from existing investorsas well as from new strategic partners, sovereign wealth funds, institutional investors, and family officesspanning the globe.The company counts among its shareholders Vulcan, Venrock, NEA, Wellcome Trust, Google and the Kuwait Investment Authority, as well as the family offices of Addison Fischer,Art Samberg, and Charles Schwab,among others.
TAE has received funding in tranches basedon projecting and achieving specificprogrammatic goals. This “money by milestone” approach has kept the company on time and on (or under) budget for its entire existence of more than 20 years.
A Milestone for Commercial Fusion
Harnessing fusion energy for utility-scale electricity requires confining plasma at “hot enough”temperatures for a “long enough” amount of time to enable fusion reactions. TAE’s current platform “Norman” nearly doubled its intended goals over an 18-month testing regime and has now demonstrated consistent performance of reaching 50+ million degrees Celsius,replicated over many hundreds of testing cycles-- all in a compactmachine that has very attractive economics when scaledup to a full power plant.
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