The agreement will see Eni purchase electricity from Commonwealth’s first commercial fusion power plant, in Virginia. The facility is still in the planning stages but is scheduled to come online in the early 2030s.
The news comes a few weeks after Commonwealth announced a $863 million funding round, bringing its total funding raised to date to nearly $3 billion. The fusion company also announced earlier this year that Google would be its first commercial power customer for the Virginia plant.
Commonwealth, a spinout from MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, is widely considered one of the leading companies in fusion power. Investment in the company represents nearly one-third of the total global investment in private fusion companies. (MIT Technology Review is owned by MIT but is editorially independent.)
Eni has invested in Commonwealth since 2018 and participated in the latest fundraising round. The vast majority of the company’s business is in oil and gas, but in recent years it’s made investments in technologies like biofuels and renewables.
“A company like us—we cannot stay and wait for things to happen,” says Lorenzo Fiorillo, Eni’s director of technology, research and development, and digital.
One open question is what, exactly, Eni plans to do with this electricity. When asked about it on the press call, Fiorillo referenced wind and solar plants that Eni owns and said the plan “is not different from what we do in other areas in the US and the world.” (Eni sells electricity from power plants that it owns, including renewable and fossil-fuel plants.)
Commonwealth is building tokamak fusion reactors that use superconducting magnets to hold plasma in place. That plasma is where fusion reactions happen, forcing hydrogen atoms together to release large amounts of energy.
The company’s first demonstration reactor, which it calls Sparc, is over 65% complete, and the team is testing components and assembling them. The plan is for the reactor, which is located outside Boston, to make plasma within two years and then demonstrate that it can generate more energy than is required to run it.