You would buy a few solar panels for your house at a few thousand dollars a pop, but would you buy a 50MW fusion reactor for your house, at the prices they'd be selling at? If not, there's clearly a continuum between you and the person they'll end up selling to first.
They are rightly taking every opportunity to clarify to investors who their potential market would be.
It has to be someone without vested interests in coal supply contracts and therefore the delayed success of your product, with a huge amount of money to throw at energy security, at a large enough scale for it to be worth a big start up cost. You also need someone to go first, because fusion is scary. This is non obvious. It is an essential part of their pitch, and no amount of cringe from people who know what electricity is is worth omitting it.
If they can make 50 MW reactors at all, then yes, I will be buying the electricity from them. Not the reactor. The electricity.
It goes down wires and is distributed nationally!
I'm also not in the personal market for: Nuclear power, offshore wind, or gas turbines.
Yet, I get electricity from all of those sources.
If they can make one 50 MW power plant, then they can make ten 50 MW power plants. Put a nice little array of them on some cheap industrial land, hook them up to the grid, and start selling 500 MW like any other power plant. Easy. You can also get funding like any other power plant. Just turn up at a bank. Or issue shares. Whatever. If it works there's no need for specialised applications. It just needs to work!
There is no need to "sell" their investors on the concept of electricity generation and usage. We get it. We all get it, in the most literal sense, right now. No need to talk us into it.
They should be selling me on their capability of producing the thing in the first place, not its utility.
That's much harder if they're faking it, which is why they talk about its utility instead.
Again, someone has to buy the reactor. They are in the business of selling reactors, not electricity. They are talking about who is going to buy the reactor. They think big companies who own data centres are going to buy the physical reactors. You are talking about something else entirely.
> Helion’s CEO speculates that its first customers may turn out to be data centers, which have a couple of advantages over other potential customers. Data centers are power-hungry, and often already have power infrastructure in place in order to be able to accept backup generators. In addition, they tend to be a little away from population centers.
They are definitely talking about selling them physical reactors.
They are rightly taking every opportunity to clarify to investors who their potential market would be.
It has to be someone without vested interests in coal supply contracts and therefore the delayed success of your product, with a huge amount of money to throw at energy security, at a large enough scale for it to be worth a big start up cost. You also need someone to go first, because fusion is scary. This is non obvious. It is an essential part of their pitch, and no amount of cringe from people who know what electricity is is worth omitting it.