General Fusion’s Greg Twinney presented a bold vision at the Energy Disruptors: UNITE 2024 conference this week, outlining how fusion energy has the potential to transform the world’s energy landscape, bringing clean, scalable, and abundant power to the grid by the mid-2030s.
The General Fusion CEO shared the progress and promise of fusion energy, emphasizing the need for both technological innovation and a viable business model to achieve commercial success.
Fusion as the Ultimate Energy Disruptor
Addressing an audience of energy industry leaders and innovators, Twinney began by discussing his motivation for joining General Fusion. “The ability to transform the energies of the world using fusion is incredibly attractive to me,” he said, highlighting his lifelong pursuit of disruptive innovations. He noted that disruptive technologies must be accompanied by a solid business model to truly succeed, a perspective gained from his years of experience in the startup world.
Twinney emphasized the urgent challenges humanity faces: decarbonizing the current energy sources, meeting the growing energy demands driven by AI, data centers, and electrification, and, ultimately, removing CO₂ from the atmosphere. “We need clean baseload energy over the long term,” he stated, underscoring the need to replace oil, coal, and natural gas with fusion as an energy disruptor.
The Science Behind Fusion
Twinney offered an overview of fusion as “nature’s ultimate energy source,” explaining that it powers the sun and stars. Fusion occurs when two light elements, deuterium and tritium, fuse under extreme conditions of heat and pressure, releasing significant energy in the form of high-energy neutrons and producing helium as a byproduct.
“The amount of energy stored in one liter of heavy water derived from seawater is the equivalent of 50,000 barrels of oil,” Twinney remarked, illustrating fusion’s incredible energy density. He went on to highlight fusion’s unique advantages: it generates no carbon emissions, produces minimal radioactive waste, and poses no risk of meltdown. Fusion’s abundant fuel source—seawater—ensures that this energy supply can be virtually limitless.
Global Progress and Canada’s Lagging Support
Twinney acknowledged that the journey to achieving practical fusion energy has been a long one, and skepticism persists. “I’ve heard it all—fusion is 30 years away and always will be,” he said, referring to the doubts surrounding the technology. However, recent breakthroughs suggest that fusion is closer than many believe. Scientific achievements, such as the first fusion reaction to produce more energy than it took to initiate, have set the stage for commercialization.
Twinney pointed out that governments around the world are racing to develop fusion technology, with the United States, the United Kingdom, China, South Korea, and Japan all making significant investments in fusion programs. However, he noted with concern that “Canada doesn’t have a national fusion program, a national fusion strategy, or a path to doing that anytime soon.”
Despite this, General Fusion remains a leader in the global race, as the only fusion company in Canada and a significant player in the commercial fusion space. “These companies, including us, have raised about seven billion dollars of capital over the last few years. It’s quite a bit of capital, but not anywhere near enough,” Twinney said, emphasizing the need for continued funding and support to achieve the next milestones.
General Fusion’s Path to Commercialization
Twinney provided an overview of General Fusion’s progress since its founding in 2002. Unlike many fusion research projects, General Fusion’s mission has always been to develop a commercial power plant, not just conduct scientific experiments. The company has been developing its technology with the end goal of generating affordable electricity at scale.
General Fusion’s approach involves creating fusion conditions using deuterium and tritium plasma, which is then compressed inside a liquid metal cylinder, similar to how a diesel engine works. This design allows the company to achieve the necessary fusion conditions while protecting the machine from harsh environments and breeding its own fuel. Twinney said that General Fusion aims to reach “power on the grid by the mid-2030s” at a cost that competes with coal—$50 to $65 per megawatt-hour.
The next major milestone for General Fusion is the commissioning of its Lawson Machine 26 (LM26) in January 2025. Twinney explained that LM26 would reach three key goals: achieving temperatures of 10 million degrees Celsius, reaching fusion temperatures of 100 million degrees, and demonstrating “break-even” conditions—producing more energy from fusion than it takes to sustain it.
A Vision for Canada’s Trillion-Dollar Company
Concluding his presentation, Twinney shared his optimism for the future of fusion energy and General Fusion’s role in it. He emphasized that the technology is “closer than you think—not just timeline but also geographically, just down the street” in Vancouver, Canada, where the company is headquartered and where 130 employees are diligently working towards commercial fusion.
Quoting Winston Churchill, Twinney remarked, “An optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” He described fusion as both a grand challenge and an incredible opportunity—to make a massive impact on climate change and to build “Canada’s trillion-dollar company next.” With the technology advancing rapidly and major milestones on the horizon, General Fusion’s journey is one to watch as it moves closer to realizing the dream of harnessing nature’s ultimate energy source.
