The old site is in Biblis, in the German state of Hesse, and it used to be a nuclear power plant run by RWE. Focused Energy wants to turn it into the first home for commercial laser fusion. A $240 million Series A round is meant to pay for that. According to the company’s own announcement, it is the largest fully secured Series A in the global fusion industry to date.
RWE, Germany’s energy major, put money in, along with SPRIND (the Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation), the European Innovation Council Fund and earlier lead investor Prime Movers Lab. Focused Energy was founded in 2021 as a spin-off of the Technical University of Darmstadt. It runs headquarters in Darmstadt and Austin, Texas, plus offices in Berlin and San Francisco.
Why Biblis
The site comes with electrical infrastructure already in place, and RWE brings experience in power plant engineering and regulatory approvals. The first demonstration system, Lighthouse, is planned for a decommissioned fission plant in Germany that RWE operated.
RWE chief executive Markus Krebber said Germany is well placed to lead globally in fusion. “With our sites that we are currently decommissioning, their existing nuclear infrastructure, and our long-standing expertise in dealing with regulatory approvals, we are creating ideal conditions to secure internationally competitive advantages for Germany,” he said.
Thomas Forner, co-founder and chief executive of Focused Energy, said the round “confirms our scientifically grounded laser fusion approach,” which he said took the company “from a startup to the world’s leading laser fusion company in just four years.”
Under the hood
The physics rests on one event. In December 2022, the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California produced the first and only controlled fusion reaction to release more energy than it took to start. Focused Energy uses the same family of method, inertial confinement, where lasers compress a fuel target.
The detail that matters is the gap between that shot and a power plant. The NIF fires about 400 shots per year; a commercial reactor must manage 10 shots per second, roughly 864,000 per day. The NIF also counted its gain against energy delivered to the fuel, not against the far larger energy drawn by the lasers. A working plant must beat the total system input.
The NIF’s gold hohlraum, which converts laser energy into X-rays, is hard to manufacture. Focused Energy drops it with a “direct drive” design in which the lasers strike the pellet directly. Debbie Callahan, who helped design the NIF fuel target, joined in December as chief strategy officer to simplify the target for production.
As ever, the money does not change the physics. TheNextWeb called RWE’s role as lead investor the most commercially meaningful signal in the round, and put the open question about Lighthouse at $500 million.
Sources
- Focused Energy raises $240M to commercialise NIF laser fusion tech
- Focused Energy secures $240m to develop laser fusion at former RWE power plant
