Thea Energy, Inc., a technology company advancing the stellarator for the commercialization of an abundant source of baseload fusion power, today announced the successful operation of the Company’s first full-size, full-current, and full-field stellarator planar shaping coil. This milestone confirms the Company’s magnet technologies for its first large-scale integrated stellarator system, “Eos”, including the design, manufacturing, and operational capabilities. Eos will demonstrate the Company’s ability to build fusion systems faster and for less capital, enabled by Thea Energy’s core technology that uses simpler, software-controlled magnet arrays, a step change from the limiting, complex 3-dimensional magnets of prior generations of the stellarator. This approach represents a new paradigm for fusion and will translate to cost-competitive power plants with greater scalability and higher uptime. Thea Energy has optimized its stellarator architecture to use standardized circular, planar magnets for its shaping coil array. This coil geometry is the most efficient use of high-temperature superconducting tape, and the simplest to manufacture at scale. Thea Energy’s stellarator architecture combined with the standardization of all shaping coils to only one unique part enables faster and more efficient production. This recent milestone demonstrated and confirmed the highest performance levels required for Eos shaping coils and gives the team confidence to proceed into Eos manufacturing scale-up and construction.

“We founded Thea Energy to unlock a simpler way to build the stellarator, and the team has now proven that by successfully designing, building, and operating multiple magnet hardware systems in a matter of a few years,” said David Gates, Ph.D., co-founder and chief technology officer of Thea Energy. “Eos will derisk the programmatic and executional aspects of ‘Helios’, our first fusion power plant, and now we have verified Eos-spec shaping coil magnets and the manufacturing technologies required to build and scale them. Our magnets are overwhelmingly easier to build compared to the complex ones used in prior generations of the stellarator. We are already starting to think about how to further scale manufacturing and quality assurance processes in our next phase. We look forward to completing additional operational campaigns that show the robustness of these magnets and sharing more on our breakthroughs with the industry.”

Full report : Thea Energy’s first Eos-spec magnet reliably reached the magnetic fields and electrical currents required to create power plant-relevant, steady-state fusion in its upcoming “Eos” stellarator.

For more see the OODA Company Profile on Thea Energy.