Nuclear fusion could potentially produce vast amounts of clean energy in future, but Avalanche Energy, which just raised $40m from investors including Toyota and Autodesk to fund development of its modular fusion reactors, is initially targeting a very specific area: space.
“The market that is addressable is very much determined by the cost of the technology,” Avalanche co-founder and CEO Robin Langtry tells Global Corporate Venturing. “We think the first five or ten units we ever build are going to be really expensive, and that’s why we think that space is the interesting first application for this – space power propulsion.”
Putting any kind of power supply into space is already signficantly expensive now, so the high costs associated with nuclear fusion will not be as much of a barrier.
“The commercial rate for solar cells in space is something like $1m a kilowatt right now,” Langtry says. “So, we think we’re going to start around $1m per kilowatt and it’s going to be that classic technology cost curve where, as you bring the cost down, you start to mass produce more of them and more markets open up.”
Nuclear fusion is still a very edge technology and US-based Avalanche only launched out of stealth just over a year ago. The startup has built a prototype micro-fusion reactor that has achieved 200 kilovolts in operating power, which it claims is the highest operating voltage achieved by a fusion device so far.
Powering satellites is just the first element of a long-term commercialisation plan expected to encompass unmanned aerial and submersible vehicles as the price of the technology comes down, before the technology reaches a point where it’s cost-competitive with batteries and fuel cells. Eventually, Avalanche’s micro-fusion devices could support a carbon-free power system chiefly based on renewable energy.
“Solar and wind paired with storage is looking really attractive for bringing down the cost of grid-scale electricity,” Langtry says. “But there are whole industries that are going to be really hard to decarbonise because batteries don’t really have the energy density or are too expensive.
“Think about long-haul trucking, it’s been really hard to break into that market with current battery technology. Think about aviation, there are almost no electric long-range airplanes on the drawing boards right now. Maritime shipping is a huge carbon source to the economy. And those are all really hard to decarbonise.
“The only options really are hydrogen – and how we make hydrogen is not necessarily clean or cost effective – or synthetic fuels, which have similar issues. So, we really think that a micro-fusion reactor could be a transformative capability to decarbonise those industries.”
Why raise money from a carmaker and a design software provider?
Toyota took part in the $40m series A round through subsidiary Toyota Ventures’ Climate Fund. The carmaker is a particularly promising partner for Avalanche due to its expertise in mass production.
“I am very interested in working with Toyota on design for manufacturing,” Langtry says. “How do you take a bespoke sort of little fusion reactor that we’re going to fly into space and re-engineer it to build millions or hundreds of millions of them? That is something that Toyota has a ton of expertise on and I’m very much looking forward to being able to lean on that and partnering with them when the time is right for something like that.”
The strategic appeal isn’t necessarily as obvious on Toyota’s side – can anyone imagine a Corolla being powered by a mini-nuclear reactor? But Langtry says it relates to the carmaker’s interest in hydrogen as a fuel and the issues with using it widely in practice.
“If you’re talking about a gas station out in the desert somewhere, it’s going to be really hard to get hydrogen deployed out of that,” he explains. “But if you had a micro fusion reactor there that was mass producing hydrogen from water, and your hydrogen car could pull up, get fuelled and go, that would be a way to basically get hydrogen deployed out to the edges of the fuel grid.
“That’s a use case that I think Toyota is really interested in. Some of the conversations we have had with them are: ‘Okay, I know your nominal unit is five kilowatts but how big could you go? Could you go up to 100 kilowatts? Could you go up to a megawatt?’ Because if you’re trying to manufacture hydrogen in situ, onsite, those are the type of energies you would want.”
Autodesk provides design software and would seem at first glance to be an even stranger fit. Its venture investments in recent years have all been directed at software developers, mainly in specialist areas like construction, factories and project management. Why fund edge energy tech if you don’t even make hardware?
“I think the interest there is very much around how micro fusion reactors would change how we design vehicles and different things, and how you would incorporate the shielding to make it safe for people,” Langtry says. “That kind of stuff. I think there’s a really interesting design element to how vehicles would change if you move from internal combustion engines to fusion, and that’s a really interesting thing that we’re looking forward to working with them on.”
The series A proceeds will be put towards research, with Avalanche’s immediate aims being to continue optimising its prototypes and miniaturising the device components as it looks to achieve 300 kilovolts. The company wants to have a final device ready in the next couple of years, and that will be when it begins work on commercialisation.
“If we are doing $100m in revenue in 2030 with space fusion, I think that is a huge success,” Langtry says. “That would be amazing. And if we’re building a giga fusion factory and mass-producing fusion reactors in 2035 for less than the price of fuel cells, that is going to be a transformative thing for the whole world.”
Photos courtesy of Avalanche Energy Designs LLC.
