David Kirtley, Helion Energy
Today’s guest is Dr. David Kirtley, Founder and CEO at Helion, which is building the world's first fusion generator and enabling a future of unlimited clean electricity.
Nuclear fusion has the potential to revolutionize the way we produce energy. As the driving force behind every star in our galaxy, fusion has long been hailed as the "holy grail" of clean energy, offering a limitless and fossil-free source of power. But the idea of harnessing fusion on Earth has seemed like a dream that’s perpetually 30 years away. However, with a recent influx of venture capital and the emergence of fusion startups, unlimited clean energy may finally be within reach.
This episode was initially recorded as a fireside chat at the SOSV Climate Tech Summit on October 25-26, 2022 (video here). Jason and David talk about Helion, the company’s origin story, approach, and progress. They also cover some of the barriers holding them back, and what it will take to get to true commercial adoption. The discussion also touches on fusion in general, why the joke has been that fusion is 30 years away and always will be, and how close we are to the exciting promise of fusion technology.
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Episode recorded on October 25, 2022.
In this episode, we cover:
[2:20] An overview of Helion
[2:50] How David came to work on fusion and its possibilities
[5:04] Status of nuclear fusion
[7:25] David's thoughts on the fusion landscape, including different players and types
[10:23] Company origin story
[12:26] How Helion pieced together their solution set
[14:20] Funding milestones to date
[15:17] Early stages and current risks
[17:54] Helion's plans for commercialization and the company's business model
[18:53] The pitch for initial customers
[20:18] Supply chain concerns
[21:04] Who David wants to hear from and open positions at Helion
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Jason Jacobs (00:02):
Hello, everyone. This is Jason Jacobs.
Cody Simms (00:04):
And I'm Cody Simms.
Jason Jacobs (00:06):
And welcome to My Climate Journey. This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms (00:16):
In this podcast, we traverse disciplines, industries, and opinions to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and all of the ways people like you and I can help.
Jason Jacobs (00:27):
We appreciate you tuning in, sharing this episode, and, if you feel like it, leaving us a review to help more people find out about us so they can figure out where they fit in addressing the problem of climate change.
(00:38):
Today's guest is Dr. David Kirtley, founder and CEO at Helion. Helion is building the world's first fusion generator, enabling a future of unlimited clean electricity. This episode was initially recorded at a fireside chat at the SOSV Climate Tech Summit, October 25th and 26th of this year. In this episode, we talk about Helion, of course, the origin story of the company. We talk about their approach and how it is different than their competitive set. We talk about their progress to date, some of the barriers holding them back, and what it will take to get to true commercial adoption. And we also have a great discussion about fusion in general, why the joke has been that fusion is 30 years away and always will be, and how close we are to commercial adoption and what it will take to get there.
(01:36):
At any rate, I really enjoyed this discussion. I wish we had more time, because we could have gone on for probably 4X or 5X the time, but hopefully this gives you a little taste of an exciting company and the exciting promise of fusion technology.
(01:49):
Okay, David Kirtley, welcome, and it's also so nice to meet you as well. We didn't do a prep call or anything, and here we are.
David Kirtley (01:57):
Great. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks, Jason.
Jason Jacobs (02:00):
I'm excited. Fusion is such an important topic, and it's a topic that seems to get climate Twitter up in arms, one way or another, and there's a lot to talk about, probably well more than we can cover in 20 minutes, but we'll do the best we can to get the most meaty subset that we can. So for starters, maybe just introduce yourself and your company.
David Kirtley (02:20):
Perfect, thank you. Hey, I'm Dr. David Kirtley, CEO of Helion Energy, and Helion's building fusion generators. Right now, our goal is to get clean fusion energy out in the world absolutely as soon as possible. So I'm excited to be here to be able to talk about our technology, talk about my background, and talk about how we're going to get there.
Jason Jacobs (02:37):
Sounds great. Well, first things first, how did you come to work on fusion even before Helion? What led you down the path that you're on to begin with? Did you grow up as a little kid in kindergarten saying, "I want to be a fusion expert when I grow up?"
David Kirtley (02:50):
I remember I was a Navy brat, actually, growing up in the military. One of the places we were stationed was Bermuda, and I got to see the space shuttle actually take off and fly over the top of Bermuda and really got to show me what we can do with ingenuity and technology. So I got really excited. How can I make real change, and energy goes right to it. You look at fusion, fusion's what powers the stars, what powers the universe. And I said, look, "Let me go figure out how to do this." When to graduate school, spent a bunch of years learning about fusion, and said, "Wow, this isn't going to happen in my lifetime."
(03:23):
And so put a pause on that and went and built rockets and some other things for a while. And it wasn't until I met up with the core team at Helion that was doing fusion a new way, what we call direct energy recovery from fusion, that there was a commercial path forward that made sense on a fast timeline. I went all in at that point, and we started building prototypes as fast as we could, absolutely as fast as we could.
Jason Jacobs (03:48):
Maybe talk a bit, not a Helion-specific question, but why fusion? If fusion works and we can commercialize fusion, so what? And I'm not saying so what to minimize it, I'm saying so what because I want to understand what is the big promise if this works out, as you and others that are working hard in the category are successful doing?
David Kirtley (04:07):
As a human, well, I'm really excited by what's happening in fusion. The just explosion in the private industry space in fusion, the amount of capital going into private fusion, it's so excellent. So I'm really hopeful of what I'm seeing overall in the technology space, as well as the commercial space, and what it means is really important. Right now, here on earth, the vast majority of our energy comes from the sun, heating, sunlight, solar, even fossil fuels originally came from fusion energy, but we haven't yet been able to harness it here on earth in a commercially relevant way.
(04:38):
And our goal is fusion has the promise of carbon dioxide-free, proliferation-free, so none of those geopolitical concerns, clean base load power generation. That's what gets us excited. We are here in Washington State, we have lots of hydro power and a little bit of wind power, and we want to keep all that that we can, but as fast as possible, replace fossil fuels with clean fusion energy.
Jason Jacobs (05:04):
And one of the big knocks I've heard from critics is just that fusion is always 10 years away and it will always be 10 years away. So before we get into the specifics of the Helion approach, just where is fusion generally in terms of getting to commercialization, and what are some of the biggest barriers generally, again, before we get into the distinct approaches within fusion?
David Kirtley (05:23):
We'll talk about Helion's approach specifically, but fusion in general, we have seen a whole variety of technology developments in the not-fusion space that allow us to just rapidly turn up the pace of building fusion machines, advanced computing for Helion specifically, high speed gigahertz fiber optics, large semiconductors that do high power pulse power systems. Those enabled us to just leapfrog over generations of previous systems. And so that lets us really speed up, it's let us build prototypes.
(05:53):
And then also there's a philosophy change. To be honest, the need for a real large scale gigawatt-scale answer to climate change is really pressing, and it's turning up the pressure on all of us to get these systems built. And so that allows us to iterate, just really focus on iterating quickly, building a prototype every year, year-and-a-half, making large scale progress, and then learning what you can, retiring that system, go build a new one as fast as you can.
(06:22):
And so there's a philosophy change, and some of this is driven by the Teslas and the SpaceXs of the world of how can you build hardware, prove new technologies as fast as humanly possible, because we have a real problem to solve, and so getting answers to those questions as soon as possible is really critical. And so we focus on technology, advanced fiber optics, advanced computing and simulation that allows us to jump over whole empirical steps and then also high-power semiconductors as big enabling sets of technologies that have happened outside of our work.
Jason Jacobs (06:53):
I'm far from a fusion expert, but another fusion entrepreneur who I spoke with a while ago, when he thinks about the landscape, I trying to paraphrase, but there's a matrix of stuff that has less risk to get to commercialization, so maybe he can get to commercialization faster, but maybe it's more incremental progress. And then on the other hand, there's stuff that's bolder and more disruptive if it works, but maybe it's higher risk or further out. How do you think about the landscape when you look at the different players and the different types of fusion that are being worked on?
David Kirtley (07:25):
Yeah, there's a lot of discussion in fusion of what are the metrics, what are the targets, what are you trying to build, and what are you trying to get it to do? So we've probably all heard of you want more fusion energy out than you put in, and there's recent systems now, big government programs that have showed that you can do that. But what we focus on at Helion, what we're doing behind me, is focusing on building systems that are commercially practical from day one. So everything we're going to talk about the Helion approach and technology, the hardware, it's all about making electricity, and that's our goal. And so even today our goal is to now, we've built six fusion prototypes, showed some really great technical and scientific results over the last few years, and now it's time to start talking about electricity and how we're going to get electricity out of fusion and on the grid.
(08:10):
And so one of the analogies I like is sort of the earliest electric cars were invented in the late 1800s. Sort of wild to believe that in 1890, there was electric prototype cars driving around, but we didn't have the batteries, the transistor hadn't been invented yet, we didn't have the computer equipment we need, we didn't have regenerative braking like we do in a Tesla now. And so you need all of those systems to take a technology that was theorized is that's the best way to make a car, but we don't know how to do it in a practical way, so we have to go through whole generations of the internal combustion engine to get back to electric cars. And what we really needed was the ancillary technologies to be able to enable those systems. And so that's what we do at Helion is we make sure, we build systems that are small, we iterate quickly, and then can we get to a system where we can get to electricity before anyone else?
Jason Jacobs (08:59):
We're going to take a short break, so our partner Yin can talk about the MCJ membership option.
Yin Lu (09:05):
Hey, folks. Yin here, a partner at MCJ Collective. I want to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ Membership Community, which was born out of the collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning and doing that goes beyond just listening to the podcast. We started in 2019 and have since then grown to 2,000 members globally. Each week, we're inspired by people who join with differing backgrounds and perspectives, and while those perspectives are different, what we all share in common is a deep curiosity to learn and bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change.
(09:34):
Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community, a number of founding teams have met, nonprofits have been established, a bunch of hiring has been done, many early stage investments have been made, as well as ongoing events and programming, like monthly Women in Climate meetups, idea jam sessions for early stage founders, climate book club, art workshops and more. So whether you've been in climate for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important. If you want to learn more, head over to mcjcollective.com and click on the Members tab at the top. Thanks, and enjoy the rest of the show.
Jason Jacobs (10:07):
Back to the show.
(10:09):
And maybe talk a bit about the origin story for the company. When did this start? How did it start? And then I know we can't go through every detail, since there's a long history, but just what are the different seasons or chapters that have led us to today?
David Kirtley (10:23):
It's funny. That analogy, that old electric car analogy, is kind of a good one in that some of the earliest concepts around fusion in the 1950s and '60s we're very related to what Helion is actually doing now, the systems we build now, where we do what is called pulsed magnetic compression. We build systems where we have a high temperature plasma, and using large magnetic fields, we squeeze that fusion plasma down. We showed we can get over 100 million degrees, 10 times the temperature of the sun, and do that repetitively over and over and over again, tens of thousands of times in a system right now.
(10:54):
But those were theorized before the invention of the transistor, and it's sort of amazing to believe what our predecessors were able to build. And it wasn't until now that we can have large scale systems that could commute gigawatts of peak power, we can build them repetitively, safely, they work all the time, reliably, and then actually demonstrate a lot of those physics of the beginning. So Helion worked on a lot of work for the Department of Energy, NASA, DARPA, some other government agencies doing early stage research. We were able to build some small prototypes in 2008, 2010 that did fusion. We said, "Wow," on a tabletop, it was a bit bigger than a tabletop at this point.
Jason Jacobs (11:32):
And was this with building a company in mind, or what was the motivation to do that initial work?
David Kirtley (11:36):
At that point, I was saying, "Hey, there's these theories of what people said we should be able to do. The technology finally is here. Let's go build them. Let's see if it actually works." And some things they were right, some things they were wrong, and we had to evolve that. But we were able to do that and build these systems that in a small laboratory, anyway, we could do fusion, exceed 1 million and then 10 million degrees in these fusion plasmas, start really doing fusion, and said, "Wow, these small scale systems for much less money, we can actually build quickly, they do fusion, let's go start scaling and see where the limits are." And at that point we said, "Great, we have this sort of proven basic research," and I cannot thank enough the US government's funding of basic research for these programs, but that allowed us to leapfrog right into private investment in 2013, spin-off Helion, and then just start building big-scale prototypes as fast as possible.
Jason Jacobs (12:26):
And you talk about how there are some components in the first go round with your predecessors didn't exist that have been a secret door, if you will, or a skip five moves in a board game as a kid or something. What are those parts, and how did you come about piecing together what would consist of the Helion solution set?
David Kirtley (12:45):
Even in my own career, when we started building these subscale systems, we weren't able to build the big ones. We were looking at trajectories of technology, saying, "Okay, well you can't buy that now, so we're going to try something very hard and very expensive to just get it built." But we see the projections of where it will be, and so with some advanced technologies, high energy capacitors relative to batteries that store all the electricity, fiber optics. When we started building these things, kilohertz fiber optics that operated in the millisecond time scale was common. But now, you can go to Best Buy and buy a 10 gigabit fiber optic network, and that allows you to control these fusion fuels on the time scale of the plasma, finally on the scale of the fusion fuel. And then also the high power switching.
(13:29):
Before it was things we had theorized, and then as we start to build our prototypes and scale them, we could buy them custom, and now we can start buying off the shelf, and then eventually you can start buying knockoffs of these systems and start thinking about how you're going to commercialize and build many tens of thousands of these generators. That's how the technology has evolved, and it's been really great for us to be at that point where the technology and all the ancillary supporting requirement technologies all grew together around the same time. We couldn't have done what we are doing 20 years ago. None of the supporting equipment existed at that time.
Jason Jacobs (14:03):
And I know you mentioned that the first private capital came in 2013. You've raised a lot of money at this point. Maybe talk a bit about the funding that you've done to date and the key milestones in each. That might not be the most intuitive way to talk about milestones, but that's kind of what I'm after is the chapters of the company.
David Kirtley (14:20):
So in 2013 when we spun off Helion, we were able to go out and raise a series A and then a series B, which was on the order of $30 million in those two fundraisers. That let us build some small scale prototypes, start scaling up the systems.
Jason Jacobs (14:34):
That's like a fusion friends and family round, right?
David Kirtley (14:37):
Well, that early work was Mithril Capital, but yeah, on the scale of fusion, it's on that scale. In contrast with our last fundraising last year, which was about $500 million in cash and then another several billion dollars in commercialization funding that unlocks when these systems turn on and start making electricity. Our goal is to demonstrate we can make electricity in 2024, so that's what the current system is. This is our seventh generation prototype. We call the one Polaris. We used to name them after Starbucks, tall grande, venti, but we ran out at some point. They got too big.
Jason Jacobs (15:09):
When you think about staging, so what were the most important things to de-risk in the early stages, and then what are the most important things to de-risk in the stage that you're in right now?
David Kirtley (15:17):
So some of the earliest things to de-risk, we haven't talked about technology too much, but this idea that we're going to directly take the fusion energy as electricity, we're going to extract that. That was one of the first things we had to show is could we build these really high efficiency modern power circuits? So that's one of the things we built in 2014 was showing we could do that and do it at really high efficiency. In fact, the efficiencies of our systems, we demonstrated, were over 95% efficiency. That means if you can build fusion systems that efficient, everything else gets smaller, simpler, the physics gets easier, but you still got to do fusion.
(15:48):
And so our third, fourth, fifth and sixth generation prototypes were scaling up the actual fusion reaction, scaling up the temperature, and then so that in 2020 we're able to build a full scale fusion system that's at a 50 megawatts scale generator in scale anyway, operate it in very for little short periods, but get over a hundred million degrees, 10 times the temperature of the sun, run it for over a year, and really show the key physics, some of the key engineering. But it wasn't running steady, it was really demonstrating physics. And so now we're building our seventh generation system that's to now take that physics that we demonstrated, tie in a lot of the engineering, recover all the electricity from it, and then for the first time in 2024, generate electricity.
Jason Jacobs (16:29):
And so between now and 2024, what is left to de-risk, and then what happens after that? What does the staging and phasing look like if you're successful?
David Kirtley (16:40):
That's a really great question. We've got a lot of work to do between now and then. And so what you're seeing behind us, we're in our facility in Everett, Washington, which is north of Seattle. And right now behind me is our first fuel injector system. So this is a large scale, multi-meter long fuel injector that'll go into Polaris, which we're building in a building that's adjacent to us, and that I can't take you to today because we're doing foundational concrete work there, but that's where we're going to build that first generator.
(17:07):
So some of the key de-risking things, we have to keep turning up the power, and we show that we can make a lot of fusion reactions, a lot of energy from these systems, but not that we would recover electricity from it. So that's the first thing we got to do is take all those advanced circuits we've built, tie it with the fusion physics, recover electricity, show you can do that for the first time.
(17:25):
And then start reparating this system. Great, you did one pulse. We demonstrate typically about a pulse every 10 minutes for an afternoon or an evening every evening when we do fusion. But we need to actually turn that up and start running not every 10 minutes, but every 10 seconds, every once a second, so we can start generating not just a little bit of electricity, but large amounts of steady electricity, and all kinds of engineering shows up when you start doing that. All the thermal engineering, reliability engineering. We're massively growing our engineering team to support this.
Jason Jacobs (17:54):
And when you say commercialization, who is this for? Who might the customers be? How involved have they been in the process to date, and what's the business model for you or for any fusion company for that matter?
David Kirtley (18:06):
This is a super great question, and if you asked all the fusion companies out there, I'm not sure you would get the same answer for each of us. Helion wants to build generators, we want to site them, and we want to actually sell that electricity. So that's our goal. Early customers are private customers, private customers that are interested in large amounts of power. They want it to be as clean as possible. So we think data centers and some other sort of big industrial customers that want clean, really exciting technologies, get them out there and get them off of the diesel generators and the other systems that they use today. They're really dirty systems they use today. And so there's a good business model overlap, there's a good requirements overlap, and so those are your first couple of customers. But eventually, we want to go as fast as we can to get out large scale base load power. That means power utilities, that means generation capability.
Jason Jacobs (18:53):
And for that initial customer set, what's the pitch? Is it a cost pitch? Is it a performance pitch? Is it a collective good pitch that they should do it because it's the right thing to do? Why make the move?
David Kirtley (19:03):
You can't win without cost, so you have to be able to answer the cost question. We'll touch on that in a second, but it's also the common good. We know that climate change is accelerating. We know that we need good base load answers to provide power that's on all the time, especially as electric transportation starts taking off more, all of those things. And so being able to provide that power for those customers is really good for their end users, for example. But then also in parallel to that, you still have to be cost competitive. Simply having a good mission isn't enough, for power utilities anyway, or even most private companies, private customers of power. And so we want to be able to push as hard as we can.
(19:39):
One of the beauties of fusion is that because the fuel is common, deuterium, found in all water on earth, safe, common, cheap, you can talk about very low-cost electricity projections of a few cents a kilowatt hour of base load power generation. And if you can get there with a fusion system that's reliable and safe and running all the time, generating no carbon dioxide, then not only have you won the cost battle, but you've also won the mission battle.
Jason Jacobs (20:05):
We're running out of time, but two final questions. One is just we've talked a lot about the factors that are within your control and areas that you are trying to de-risk. If you could wave your magic wand and change one thing that is outside of your control that would most accelerate your progress, what would you change and how would you change it?
David Kirtley (20:18):
It's a very good question. I think in the world right now, one of the things that we worry about a lot is a lot of the supply chain. We worry about we have to source a lot of equipment from overseas. We source it all throughout the United States. We're building as fast as we can, manufacturing internal in Washington State, but what's going on in the world to accelerate fusion, the more that we could do to get large scale capacitor, large scale semiconductor manufacturing, and there's been some really interesting legislation that just happened around this, which is really exciting for us too, and get those in the United States, get large-scale manufacturing, that would help us a lot. So we spend a lot of time thinking about how to de-risk the manufacturing part of this.
Jason Jacobs (20:55):
And last question, just for anyone who is attending the event and listening to this interview, who do you want to hear from? How can the audience be helpful to you?
David Kirtley (21:04):
The big thing I always want to point out, Helion's hiring. We passed over 100 people about a month ago. We are hiring the best and brightest engineers, we're building something no one's ever built before, and so there's a lot of good work to do, a lot of exciting new ground. What I actually like to tell a lot of our engineers and scientists that join is there is no fusion textbook on how to build a fusion generator. It doesn't exist. The people that are getting into fusion today in this exciting field are the ones that are writing those textbooks, they're writing the manuals for how to do fusion and how to get it out in the world.
Jason Jacobs (21:37):
David, thank you for this discussion, and best of luck to you and the Helion team. I'll be rooting for you.
David Kirtley (21:42):
Thank you very much. It's a pleasure. Thanks, Jason.
Jason Jacobs (21:45):
Thanks again for joining us on the My Climate Journey Podcast.
Cody Simms (21:49):
At MCJ Collective, we're all about powering collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem-solving capacity. To do this, we focus on three main pillars, content, like this podcast and our weekly newsletter, capital to fund companies that are working to address climate change, and our member community to bring people together as Yin described earlier.
Jason Jacobs (22:11):
If you'd like to learn more about MCJ Collective, visit us at www.mcjcollective.com. And if you have guest suggestions, feel free to let us know on Twitter at #mcjpod.
Cody Simms (22:26):
Thanks, and see you next episode.
