Why not just say "Microsoft commits some money for us to research if Fusion will be possible in ways we can think of"?
I’ve learned a lot about fusion power in previous threads on the subject - all you can learn here is how bitter and cynical some people are about this particular company’s efforts.
There's this weird thing with the richer society I've moved into from being in tech, where people think being anesthetized is the same as being happy.
No psychologist I've met advises what I see people assume: you must always hold back negative thoughts. They then apply techniques for reducing stress from overwhelming thoughts to advise eliminating all negative thought.
Sorry, I do not subscribe to the idea that everybody should just ignore and move on when they see nonsense.. If nobody cares, then what is the point of our collective existence as a society? As an exaggerated example, if we all stopped caring whether a business claiming to do something can actually do it or not, doesn’t it incentivise every business to just lie and deceive as their way of business? Is that the world we should be looking forward to?
If an opposing viewpoint doesn’t have any thoughtful, well reasoned proponents, maybe it’s not that interesting of a viewpoint?
I doubt that (unless you have some source for it which I missed, in which case sorry). It seems really unlikely that Helion would commit to a contract with penalty clauses if they didn't get money before they got fusion working.
Once (if) they have commercial fusion working they're golden, it will be trivial to raise money on excellent terms, and as such they won't need income from this contract. If this contract only gave them money at that point it wouldn't be worth very much to them.
If the contract gave them money now though... well right now it's hard to raise money. Taking a loan out could make sense. Getting the option to repay that loan by providing services could make sense. And what is a contract where you get paid now on the condition that you pay back more at the end (either in dollars in energy) if not a loan?
Besides, it's a loan which serves as great PR for both companies.
I doubt that if somebody can get fusion to work at a competitive price, scale, stability etc. that they would lack buyers.
Helion gets continued funding from Microsoft (maybe increasingly expensive at this stage as they scale the tech up and operationalize it). Microsoft gets good PR, a likely profitable investment, and eventually cheap electricity as a bonus.
I believe Sam Altman has most of his personal net worth (to tune of few hundred million) invested in Helion, and no doubt brokered this deal, so it can also be seen as a doubling-down by Microsoft of their relationship with and commitment to OpenAI/Altman.
I definitely buy that there's a market for small power plants that cost too much to be competitive on the grid (in some sense that's literally what generators already are), but I don't see how datacenters are in that market.
Are you kidding? If datacenters aren't the majority of that market, they will be soon, and their share will keep growing on the short term. Only factories match their consumption, every other wholesale energy buyer is relatively tiny.
But that market will pay at most a 3x to 5x markup on the grid price. There exists a smaller one formed by far from the grid activities that will pay a much higher price.
Electricity distributors may add a markup of over 10x on resale. For many reasons, it's easier to get energy out of them so you just won't pay the full ~10x markup on the wholesale market.
You do, unless you sign a contract with a large datacenter operator that's willing to pay above market price for the PR benefit/green energy credits of a working fusion reactor. Which presumably is the point of this.
There's no real reason fusion couldn't end up the same way.
It's the fate of most technologies to fail this way, so it shouldn't be surprising (or a source of dishonor) if the same thing happens to fusion. That doesn't mean money spent developing fusion is necessarily wasted; the size of the energy market -- a quadrillion dollars or so over the 21st century -- justifies longshot investments.
Given that there is substantial demand for electricity, why would this be a concern?
But it's exactly the real scenario at play. However Microsoft is calling dibs on the energy that will be generated if fusion turns out to be not vaporware
Wasn't OpenAI one of those investments? That investment seems to have paid off.