Melanie Windridge interviews Phil Larochelle from Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Clea Kolster from Lowercarbon Capital to explore key contextual questions on fusion as an investment opportunity:

• Why is investor interest in fusion growing? How investible is fusion?
• What is needed for fusion to main-stream, and how does it get there?
• How will rising rates/the current market downturn affect funding for fusion?

A panel of senior figures from the world’s leading public and private fusion energy entities discuss and define the path to commercialisation:

• What is the current status of the leading technologies? What challenges remain to achieving break-even?
• How has the financing environment changed in the past 12 months and how can the challenges be navigated?
• How important is the monetization of IP, adjacent applications and other pre-generation revenues to maintaining cash and progress?
• How does the path and its risks evolve as things move from science and tech, to engineering, to construction, to commercial risk?

Matt Trevithick, Co-Founder, Leitmotif presents the case for investment in fusion, in the context of the scale of money and time needed to commercialize fusion and the benefits of a portfolio approach.

A panel of leading investors in fusion share their thoughts on fusion as an investment opportunity and how fusion sits alongside allocations to renewables, alternative energy, deep-tech:

• What are expectations, over what time horizon, and how has fusion performed vs. expectations thus far?
• Can fusion enhance short- and long-term returns? Does it reduce risk/bring diversification to a portfolio? What’s an ideal weighting towards fusion?
• How might a ‘megafund’, amalgamating fusion projects into a single financial entity, improve the risk-return profile fusion investments?
• Few and large investments in scientifically mature approaches or several smaller early-stage investments in novel approaches?
• Many investors lack the in-house expertise to assess the merits of fusion technology and there is little public research available to assist analysts. How can technical analysis/diligence be effected efficiently?

A panel to discuss opportunities presented by smaller fusion companies pursuing original approaches and looking for Seed or series A funding:

• Why is it important to investigate less-mature approaches when other, established approaches are moving ahead at pace?
• Most fusion efforts focus on approaches that are capex-intensive but well researched over decades in public labs while simpler concepts are being pursued by other private companies. How do their risk profiles compare?
• What criteria do investors apply when researching and funding novel, early-stage fusion approaches?
• How can investments in alternative fusion approaches best fit in an investor’s portfolio?

Leaders from MIT’s PSFC and Proto Ventures present the major findings from their study of opportunities in commercial fusion across the entire value chain, from advanced materials and individual components, to subsystems, services, and software solutions.

Investing in companies that seek to resolve engineering or construction challenges of fusion companies; supply the specialist inputs fusion requires, can both give diverse exposure in fusion plus other markets and a quicker path to profitability.

• What technical challenges in fusion present investment opportunities?
• Do these businesses with expertise in e.g. LTS magnets, reactor-vessel materials give diverse exposure to both fusion and other markets?
• How do companies seeking to use industrialized fusion tech for non-power applications eg. medical, compare to those with a sole focus on fusion energy?
• What is needed to identify promising technologies at universities and spin them into enabling tech companies for fusion?
• To what extent does this mitigate fusion investment risk by securing cash-flows and by scaling longer-term supply-chains and capabilities.
• What are the prospects for consolidation in fusion, fusion-tech and supply chains? What strategic benefits might consolidation bring?

A moderated discussion with senior executives from Commonwealth Fusion Systems, one of the world’s leading fusion companies & their investors, exploring their capital-raising process and experience from start-up to major.

A panel of senior representatives from public and private sectors discuss collaboration can accelerate progress to commercialisation and create investable opportunities:

• How do partnerships mitigate the challenges of financing long-term, capital-intensive projects such as fusion?
• What is the optimum role for the public sector in tech & engineering, in finance, and in the supply chain?
• Who are the optimal partners for fusion companies – energy majors, public sector entities, other fusion companies?
• How are partnerships most effectively structured?

A live poll of all participants – speakers, panelists and audience – seeks to understand: the consensus view on most likely/worst case for fusion in the grid; and whether, and under what conditions, in what timeframe, and with what expectations the audience would invest in fusion.