fusion funding

Houston venture firm invests in Virginia fusion power plant company in collaboration with TAMU

NearStar Fusion team Andrew Case, Chris Faranetta, Douglas Witherspoon, Amit Singh and Marco Luna. Photo courtesy NearStar Fusion.

Houston-based climate tech venture firm Ecosphere Ventures has partnered with Virginia Venture Partners and Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation’s venture capital program to invest in Virginia-based NearStar Fusion Inc., which develops fusion energy power plants.

NearStar aims to use its proprietary plasma railgun technology to safely and affordably power baseload electricity on and off the power grid through a Magnetized Target Impact Fusion (MTIF) approach, according to a news release from the company.

NearStar’s power plants are designed to retrofit traditional fossil fuel power plants and are expected to serve heavy industry, data centers and military installations.

“Our design is well-suited to retrofit coal-burning power plants and reuse existing infrastructure such as balance of plant and grid connectivity, but I’m also excited about leveraging the existing workforce because you won’t need PhDs in plasma physics to work in our power plant,” Amit Singh, CEO of NearStar Fusion, said in a news release.

NearStar will also conduct experiments at the Texas A&M Hypervelocity Impact Laboratory (HVIL) in Bryan, Texas, on prototype fuel targets and evolving fuel capsule design. The company plans to publish the results of the experiments along with a concept paper this year. NearStar will work with The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) to develop computer performance models for target implosions.

NearStar’s MTIF approach will utilize deuterium, which is a common isotope of hydrogen found in water. The process does not use tritium, which NearStar believes will save customers money.

“While avoiding tritium in our power plant design reduces scientific gain of the fusion process, we believe the vastly reduced system complexity and cost savings of eliminating complicated supply chains, regulatory oversight, and breeding of tritium allows NearStar to operate power plants more profitably and serve more customers worldwide, ”Douglas Witherspoon, NearStar founder and chief scientist, said in a news release.

Houston’s Ecosphere Ventures invests in climate tech and sustainability innovations from pre-seed to late-seed stages in the U.S. Ecosphere also supports first-time entrepreneurs and technical founders.

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A View From HETI

A new joint venture will work on four projects supplying 5 gigawatts of power from combined-cycle power plants for the ERCOT and PJM Interconnection grids. Photo via Getty Images.

Houston-based power provider NRG Energy Inc. has formed a joint venture with two other companies to meet escalating demand for electricity to fuel the rise of data centers and the evolution of generative AI.

NRG’s partners in the joint venture are GE Vernova, a provider of renewable energy equipment and services, and TIC – The Industrial Co., a subsidiary of construction and engineering company Kiewit.

“The growing demand for electricity in part due to GenAI and the buildup of data centers means we need to form new, innovative partnerships to quickly increase America’s dispatchable generation,” Robert Gaudette, head of NRG Business and Wholesale Operations, said in a news release. “Working together, these three industry leaders are committed to executing with speed and excellence to meet our customers’ generation needs.”

Initially, the joint venture will work on four projects supplying 5 gigawatts of power from combined-cycle power plants, which uses a combination of natural gas and steam turbines that produce additional electricity from natural gas waste. Electricity from these projects will be produced for power grids operated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) and PJM Interconnection. The projects are scheduled to come online from 2029 through 2032.

The joint venture says the model it’s developing for these four projects is “replicable and scalable,” with the potential for expansion across the U.S.

The company is also developing a new 721-megawatt natural gas combined-cycle unit at its Cedar Bayou plant in Baytown, Texas. Read more here.

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