Helion's shifts goalpost on fusion energy

Sam Altman-backed Helion Energy is quietly hedging how soon it expects to hit full operation, based on statements from executives and updates to its website.

Why it matters: The startup reached a $15.5 billion post-money valuation by promising to commercialize fusion energy production years ahead of competitors.

State of play: Helion this year removed a prediction from its website that Orion, the company's first commercial power plant, will begin producing electricity by 2028.

• A Helion webpage for the Orion project now says the power plant will "begin initial operations in 2028." It does not define initial operations.
• Full power won't come before 2029 or 2030, an executive acknowledged this summer.
• "We will not, in no universe, have 50 megawatts hit full operation in 2028," Helion public affairs director Jackie Siebens said on-stage at the FusionX conference in Boston, per a transcript shared with Axios Pro.
• The company declined to comment on this story.

What we're watching: The company's contract with Microsoft requires Orion, the company's first commercial power plant, to at least "be connected to the grid and begin operations by the end of 2028," Siebens said on stage at FusionX.

• It's unclear whether its goal of connecting to the grid in 2028 also encompasses supplying electricity.
• Microsoft declined to comment.

Context: "The plant will produce at least 50 MWe after an initial ramp-up period," the site had said as recently as December, referring to megawatts-electric.

• The company had also declared last summer that it would begin supplying electricity to customer Microsoft in 2028.

Zoom in: The updates have occurred as Helion has also dialed back its stated goals for an earlier prototype, Polaris, from producing "net electricity" to simply "demonstrating electricity from fusion."

• Helion explained the change on its website by noting that net electricity "was not well defined within the fusion industry and created more confusion than clarity."

Between the lines: "Net electricity" refers specifically to generating more electricity than a reactor consumes. It's the milestone every fusion developer is striving toward and a term that's commonly used.

• Demonstrating electricity from fusion, by contrast, requires only showing that some fusion energy was converted into electricity.
• "Those are two pretty different things," a fusion energy analyst tells Axios Pro.

Flashback: Helion initially declared that the Polaris prototype would at least demonstrate net electricity as soon as 2024. Virtually every other fusion developer has targeted the 2030s at the earliest.

• The bold claims helped Helion raise $1.5 billion since its launch in 2013, including $465 million in Series G funding in June led by Thrive Capital.

Some energy-focused investors are questioning the fundamental viability of Helion's approach to fusion.

Threat level: Two academic papers published this year have added to the concerns.

• In one paper, French plasma physicist Timothée Nicolas wrote that a reactor like Helion's Polaris prototype probably wouldn't produce enough fusion energy to overcome losses.
• Helion's assumptions seem "wrong by orders of magnitude," Nicolas tells Axios Pro, who allows that he's "on the pessimistic side of the spectrum" when it comes to producing electricity from any fusion company's reactor.

Another paper, from German plasma physicist Karl Lackner, found that one of Helion's key assumptions — that fusion fuel ions can remain much hotter than the electrons around them — probably won't hold up in an eventual power plant.

• Both reports are "pointing out some pretty fundamental things — things you learn in the first year of grad school in fusion," an energy-focused venture investor tells Axios Pro.

The other side: Helion has responded on its website to issues raised by Nicolas and Lackner, arguing that its design can recover electrical energy significantly more efficiently than historical estimates suggest, and that it can produce fusion and recover energy before its hot fuel ions cool.

Behind the scenes: The Everett, Wash.-based company generally shares much less about its research than do its fusion competitors, such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems, with Helion CEO David Kirtley expressing concern about IP theft by adversaries such as China.

The bottom line: Helion has walked back the milestones that once made it the most ambitious developer in fusion energy.

• "I don't think you can say they will never, ever get there," the investor tells Axios Pro. "It's just that they are so far away."