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Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

helionenergy.com

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Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#201

Post by throwawaymaths »

ramraj07 wrote: post #92
thepasswordis wrote: post #58

HN, what the heck has happened to you? What is with all of these cynical comments? Helion is an awesome company, their technology is real, and this is cool. >oh no this might not work! Do you guys not understand that you’re posting on the forum of a venture capital firm/startup accelerator?

You can be optimistic when you’re just making an app to rent your room out or to find a dog walker. You can hustle and sell useless SaaS services long enough to get acquired for no real reason except managerial power plays in large companies. In the world of software you can kinda make almost any idea work with sweat and political maneuvering. You can literally see that they’re trying to play the same games here. How…

> You can’t just hustle out of it. I’ve been laughing at the type of biotech companies that get funded by SV

Yes, SV funds incredibly stupid biotechs. It also passes over really good biotechs. I think it's because honest founders are likely to do good work, and won't pitch with a $$ ask that doesn't make sense, and SV equity raises don't make sense for such capital intensive activities.

Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#202

Post by slaw »

pfdietz wrote: post #183
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #148

Reminds me of a similarly vague "statement" made by BOOM supersonic, another YC company. [0] Here's an excerpt: United will purchase 15 of Boom’s ‘Overture’ airliners, once Overture meets United’s demanding safety, operating and sustainability requirements, with an option for 35 more aircraft. Slated to carry passengers in 2029, the net-zero carbon aircraft will fly on 100% sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). Let me tel…

Boom had the problem that no jet engine maker ended up wanting to make an engine they could use. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzyOIwjYK7E

That is not new problem. Airbus couldn't get modern jet engines for it's A380 and it was cancelled.

Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#203

Post by anonuser123456 »

alexb_ wrote: post #136
anonuser123456 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The price of oil+nat gas will fall as alternative forms of energy come online. But when the price falls, consumption goes up (demand elasticity).

If the logic works in this direction, it works in the other direction too - are you saying we should shut down renewable energy so that the price of energy goes up and consumption of it goes down accordingly?

>are you saying we should shut down renewable energy so that the price of energy goes up and consumption of it goes down accordingly?

No. I’m suggesting that once a cost competitive alternative exists at scale for hydrocarbons, we institute Pigouvian taxes (e.g. carbon taxes). This ensures that at the margin, people are incentivized to choose low/zero carbon energy sources.

Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#204

Post by femto113 »

pfdietz wrote: post #118
femto113 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they are really only 5 years from producing sellable power they are already capable of a science demo that would render this sort of vapid publicity stunt pointless. I’ve set a reminder to check back in 5 years, if the cynicism was genuinely needless I’ll apologize.

I suggest you do a deep dive into the physics behind their design. It's quite clever. They are able to evade some of the practical showstopping issues that face most other fusion approaches.

This announcement has nothing to do with physics. As stated, it's just an agreement for Microsoft to buy electricity, and not obviously an agreement to do so at any particular price. And why make this move now? Is Helion afraid that no one would buy their electricity? It's literally the most fungible commodity ever and we're heading into an era of unprecedented demand for charging EVs. Anyone offering reliable, environmentally friendly in 2028 will have no problem selling all they can produce. And why pick a specific customer at all? That's a weird way to sell bulk electricity, which is distributed by grids that cover millions of consumers. I could see Microsoft needing to make such an agreement before Constellation might be willing to finance new transmission from the grid to a remote Azure data center, but nothing in this announcement suggests that's the case. The only plausible explanation for this move is financial--Helion is going to leverage Microsoft's name to lure investment--and/or some sort of carbon credit/greenwashing play by Constellation & Microsoft.

Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#205

Post by ramraj07 »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #170
ramraj07 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can be optimistic when you’re just making an app to rent your room out or to find a dog walker. You can hustle and sell useless SaaS services long enough to get acquired for no real reason except managerial power plays in large companies. In the world of software you can kinda make almost any idea work with sweat and political maneuvering. You can literally see that they’re trying to play the same games here. How…

You say that but biological medicine and Technology continues to improve. The trajectory is positive. Will every startup be successful? Of course not! But as a whole, technology continues to March forward and improve.

It doesn’t seem to be improving through Silicon Valley VC money though. Name one SV funded biotech startup. Ginkgo is cool though.

Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#206

Post by bequanna »

kataklasm wrote: post #196
bequanna wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having watched a short documentary on ITER it seems like an incredible waste. A bunch of mismanagement and bureaucratic nonsense. As an American, it seemed like exactly what we would expect from a Euro-based project. By the time any actual work can be done at ITER, won't the technology have progressed beyond they design they are trying to test?

Why the anti-European sentiment in your comment? Let's not talk about the Space Shuttle or the SLS, should we?

Why? How does it compare to Europe’s Space Shuttle?

Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#207

Post by ramraj07 »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #129
ramraj07 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can be optimistic when you’re just making an app to rent your room out or to find a dog walker. You can hustle and sell useless SaaS services long enough to get acquired for no real reason except managerial power plays in large companies. In the world of software you can kinda make almost any idea work with sweat and political maneuvering. You can literally see that they’re trying to play the same games here. How…

That's almost exactly what they said to Elon Musk when he started SpaceX, and now they are on a streak of >100 successful missions in a row.

Yes but spacex didn’t promise anything physicists said is impossible. Engineers saying impossible is different from physicists saying it.

The equivalent would be if spacex said something that violated the rocket equation. They didn’t. And also while they promise the Mars, they can settle for the largest reusable rocket as a consolation prize. In fields like biotech and fusion there’s often no consolation prize. So spacex was well managed with the right level of optimism and practicality. Not so here.

Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#208

Post by marcosdumay »

gpm wrote: post #131
marcosdumay wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 activit…

Why would datacenters be willing to pay a 3x to 5x markup on the grid price when they could just connect to the grid?

Wholesale buyers are willing to pay 3x to 5x (depends on the location) more than electricity distributors.

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.

Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#209

Post by PurpleRamen »

thepasswordis wrote: post #58

HN, what the heck has happened to you? What is with all of these cynical comments? Helion is an awesome company, their technology is real, and this is cool. >oh no this might not work! Do you guys not understand that you’re posting on the forum of a venture capital firm/startup accelerator?

> Helion is an awesome company, their technology is real

How do you know? Have you seen it? The website itself is very sketchy, full of unrealistic claims and very vague explanations, it reads like a fanfic. Of course do people not buy this, it just smells too hard of scam.

Re: Helion’s fusion power purchase agreement with Microsoft

#210

Post by bmitc »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #179
bmitc wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it isn't just about power production. People use that power to then go off and do things. The question I'm asking is what does that look like? Because how we do things still requires oil and other destructive acts, for example. An analogous situation is electric cars. Electric cars, eventually over the lifetime of use (not immediately), save emissions over combustion engine cars. However, building a single mi…

>then that has a downstream effect of more roads being built and maintained, which is far more polluting than the cars themselves. Surely this is negligable compared to the carbon currently being emitted by ICE cars? The first source I can find says that building and maintaining one lane mile of highway emits 3,500 tons of CO2, whereas the vehicles driving on it will emit 90,000 tons of CO2.

I shouldn't have included maintained in there because I just meant the emissions for manufacture. The emissions for building an electric car is more than that of a combustion engine car, and building a mile of single lane road dwarfs both of those. So switching to electric cars keeps us building roads and increases emissions at the time manufacture. To get the real story, one needs to consider the use of and maintenance of these things. At some point, there is a crossover point where electric cars have less total emissions than combustion cars. But the use of electric cars will not slow the building, use, and maintenance. If anything, they will increase it because they make buying and owning a car sexy again. Plus, electric cars are far heavier than combustion cars, which will increase road wear. And most analyses don't include battery recycling and disposal as part of an electric cars emissions. So electric cars are probably or even maybe a win in the long term, but the simple act of having electric cars isn't enough.

My point is that one can't simply look at the power production of a car as the sole comparison, and I think that also holds true for power plants. I just haven't seen this analysis for fusion plants. They will be a good thing for sure, but I worry many think it's a silver bullet, and I'd like to understand their affects once they're on the scene.

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