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Eni agrees to buy power from 400-MW ARC fusion plant in

Virginia

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Virginia's data centers drive demand for fusion energy

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Deal follows similar one with Google for 200 MW

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Fusion still has work to do on technology, says CFS CEO

By Timothy Gardner

WASHINGTON, Sept 22 (Reuters) -

Italian energy company Eni said on Monday it struck

a more than $1 billion power purchase with Commonwealth Fusion

System's project in Virginia that the companies hope by the

early 2030s will generate electricity through the reaction that

fires the sun.

Eni agreed to buy power from the 400-megawatt (MW) ARC

project in Chesterfield County, Virginia, despite CFS not

knowing exactly what the project cost or when it will be

completed.

Any power generated by the project is expected to go to

the grid in

Virginia

, home to the world's biggest hub of energy-hungry data

centers.

"This is showing in concrete terms, that people that use

large amounts of energy, that know the energy market, that they

want fusion power and that they're willing to contract for it,"

Bob Mumgaard, CFS CEO and co-founder, said about the deal.

Big Tech, utilities and energy companies are scrambling to

secure electricity supply as U.S. power demand rises for the

first time in two decades on artificial intelligence and data

centers.

Eni, traditionally a major fossil fuel company, is

rebranding itself as an energy technology company, investing in

CFS since 2018.

Eni believes fusion is a "very disruptive, fundamental way,"

to solve energy problems including cost and sustainability,

Lorenzo Fiorillo, Eni's technology, R&D and digital director,

told reporters in a teleconference.

CFS, which spun out of MIT in 2018, has raised nearly $3

billion in capital. It struck a similar power purchase deal in

June with Alphabet's Google for 200 MW from The ARC

plant for an undisclosed price.

ENI and CFS did not specify the amount of power in their

purchase agreement.

Physicists at national laboratories and companies have been

trying for decades to use lasers or, in the case of CFS, large

magnets to foster fusion reactions, in which light atoms are

forced together under extreme heat to release large amounts of

energy.

In 2022, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in

California briefly achieved net energy gain in a fusion

experiment using lasers.

But achieving so-called "engineering break-even," in which

more energy comes out of a reaction than the overall energy that

goes into a fusion plant to spark a reaction, has been elusive.

And for a plant to generate power from fusion, the reactions

must be constant, not rare.

"We're not here saying today that fusion power has no

technology left to do," said Mumgaard. "But the character of

that technology has shifted from ... 'Can this ever work?' into

a question like 'Okay, what're the details of how, when and

where?'"