There are expectations of changes to Germany\u2019s energy sector based on policies touted by the country\u2019s likely new government, which could include the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU)\/Christian Social Union (CSU) alliance and the Social Democrats, or SPD, which have said they may lower the country\u2019s renewable energy and climate initiatives. Reports have said the officials would still have Germany continue with efforts to become carbon-neutral by 2045, though a report from the parties said their approach would combine \u201cclimate protection, economic competitiveness, and social balance, and focuses on innovation.\u201d<\/p>\n
Part of that approach would be to push back the closure of coal-fired generation to 2038, as opposed to the discussion of exiting coal as early as 2030. Alexander Bethe, chairman of VDKi, a lobbying group concerned with imports of coal, in a statement earlier this year said, \u201cModern hard coal plants are an important backbone of German power grids. In order to tap into sufficient secure power supply, it will be necessary to introduce a capacity market that is open to any technology, competitive, and centralized.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/fig1-fusion-power-plant-rendering-focused-energy.jpg\")
<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n1. This is a rendering of the proposed nuclear fusion power plant being developed by companies including Focused Energy at a site in Germany. Courtesy: Focused Energy\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
The March roundtable addressed the return of nuclear power. Officials said the Biblis facility, owned by German energy major RWE, would be the site of a future fusion pilot plant and could eventually be the location of an operating fusion plant (Figure 1).<\/p>\n
The Biblis nuclear station featured two pressurized water reactors and had generation capacity of almost 2.4 GW. The first reactor came online in 1974, with the second in 1976. It ceased operations in 2011 as German officials began the country\u2019s phase-out of nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster in Japan in March of that year. The roundtable came just weeks after Munich-based Proxima Fusion and its partners in a research venture published a new peer-reviewed paper announcing Stellaris, a technology that those groups said would be the world\u2019s first integrated concept for a commercial fusion power plant.<\/p>\n
The Hessen government has committed \u20ac20 million ($21.6 million) to fusion research and development, and it hopes to secure more funding from the German government. The agreement means Focused Energy has a potential customer in the German government, along with a plant operator in RWE\u2014Germany\u2019s largest energy company\u2014and an industrial consortium to support the equipment supply chain. Officials estimate the cost of a full-scale, 1-GW fusion power plant would be \u20ac5 billion to \u20ac7 billion ($5.4 billion to $7.6 billion).<\/p>\n
Officials with Focused Energy told POWER the company \u201cis pursuing direct drive inertial confinement or laser fusion. This approach builds off the success of the National Ignition Facility [NIF] at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, which achieved scientific energy gain using laser fusion in December 2022. Several of the scientists who achieved gain at NIF now lead Focused\u2019s scientific team.\u201d<\/p>\n
The company noted the 1-GW generation capacity figure for a power plant, and said, \u201cThe facility would use Focused\u2019s proprietary deuterium-tritium fusion fuel targets, called \u2018Pearls.\u2019 Focused has one of the only target labs in the world to design and optimize these low-cost, millimeter-scale fusion fuel targets. Deuterium-tritium originates from seawater and lithium, and is the only fuel yet to achieve controlled ignition and gain.\u201d Focused told POWER the company\u2019s targetry lab in Darmstadt, Germany, is developing the Pearls fuel.<\/p>\n
Focused officials said the company is developing the fuel targets and lasers required for commercial laser fusion at its facilities in Germany and California, telling POWER, \u201cWe are currently developing a smaller-scale demonstration facility and the design for our pilot plant. We\u2019re working in concert with the government in Germany and the U.S., as well as a cohort of industrial and technical partners to ready our plan to respond to commercial power plant interest from entities looking toward first deployments, similar to the RFP [request for proposal] the German government has been proposing\/developing.\u201d<\/p>\n
The MoU said the companies involved in the project aim \u201cto create the conditions to establish a nuclear fusion campus\u2014a state-of-the-art center for nuclear fusion technology in Hesse\u2014that promotes research, development, and commercial applications. Particular attention is paid to creating an innovation-friendly environment that relies on synergies between the partners involved.\u201d The document also references creation of a European network, in which, \u201cThe partners will pool their expertise and resources to become a leader in nuclear fusion technology at international level and in particular to promote cooperation with European research institutions and companies.\u201d<\/p>\n
German Prime Minister Boris Rhein at the March 13 roundtable said laser-based nuclear fusion would be a key technology for a clean and economical energy supply. \u201cWe need an energy mix that is open to technology, because the sun doesn\u2019t always shine and the wind doesn\u2019t blow all the time,\u201d said Rhein in comments provided to POWER. \u201cWe can only secure our prosperity if energy is available at all times and remains affordable for everyone. Nuclear fusion can be the game-changer and bring about the decisive breakthrough.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rhein continued, \u201cWe are committed to a common vision. We want to establish Hesse as a leading location for cutting-edge research and development in laser-based nuclear fusion and pave the way towards commercial fusion energy. To this end, a demonstration plant and later a power plant are to be funded at the Biblis site.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rhein said Germany must be committed to policies that support energy innovation. \u201cTop research for innovative forms of energy must take place in Germany again. It is a very good signal that the future federal government wants to promote fusion research more and is pursuing the goal of building the world\u2019s first fusion reactor in Germany. We are not allowed to get out everywhere, we have to get back in,\u201d said Rhein. \u201cI am firmly convinced that we can make nuclear fusion the energy supplier of the future. Biblis is intended to become a nucleus for energy supply \u2018made in Hesse,\u2019 making Hesse the number one nuclear fusion location.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kaweh Mansoori, Hessen\u2019s minister of Economic Affairs and the deputy head of government, said the country must address the growing demand for power. \u201cThis presents us with the urgent task of using all available options to ensure a climate-friendly, secure, and economical energy supply,\u201d said Mansoori. \u201cIn addition to expanding wind and solar energy, we are also investing in future technologies such as laser-based nuclear fusion. Germany, and Hesse in particular, are excellently positioned for this. With companies like Focused Energy in Darmstadt and the excellent local scientific institutions, we have players who are setting standards in international fusion research. This offers Hesse a historic opportunity not only to develop a key technology, but also to produce it competitively.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mansoori continued: \u201cThis is a crucial step to strengthen our innovative strength and independence at a time when international supply chains and energy imports are becoming increasingly uncertain. I am convinced that the energy industry and the industrial landscape in Hesse can be expanded in a sustainable manner. To this end, we want to promote the development of a highly developed infrastructure and the creation of new jobs in research, development, and industrial production.\u201d<\/p>\n
Timon Gremmels, the Hessen minister for Science and Research, Art and Culture, during the roundtable said, \u201cFusion energy offers great long-term potential. We still have a lot of exciting research work to do before we get to that point. We want to establish Hesse as a leading location for cutting-edge research and the development of laser-based nuclear fusion. At the same time, we want to research renewable energies and storage technologies that are marketable in the short and medium term in order to become climate neutral by 2045. We have the best conditions for this in Hesse with our strong research landscape and the planned cluster of excellence \u2018Energy 2040.\u2019 If we promote both equally, we can end expensive dependencies in fossil energy supplies.\u201d<\/p>\n
Proxima Fusion in its recently published paper said its Stellaris design builds on results of the Wendelstein 7-X research experiment in Germany, which has been considered the most advanced quasi-isodynamic (QI) stellarator prototype in the world. The design uses high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets to confine the plasma. Wendelstein 7-X in February 2023 succeeded in generating a high-energy plasma that lasted for eight minutes.<\/p>\n
Proxima Fusion was founded in 2023 by a team led by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. The company has said the Stellaris design incorporates groundbreaking technical features, including a magnetic field design that obeys all key physics optimization goals for energy production. The group wrote, \u201cThis class of QI-HTS stellarators, labeled Stellaris, is shown to achieve an extensive set of desirable properties for reactor candidates simultaneously for the first time, offering a compelling path toward commercially viable fusion energy. We summarize a comprehensive reactor study, ranging from optimization of the plasma confinement region to first wall cooling, divertor considerations, blanket design, magnet quench safety, support structures, and remote maintenance solutions. Our results demonstrate that a coherent set of trade-offs between physics and engineering constraints can lead to a compelling stellarator design, suited for power plant applications. We anticipate that this work will motivate greater focus on QI stellarators, in both publicly and privately funded research.\u201d<\/p>\n
Proxima Fusion officials said the company plans to demonstrate that stellarators are capable of net energy production with its demo stellarator Alpha in 2031. The company said its goal is to deliver fusion energy to the power grid at some point during the 2030s.<\/p>\n
\u2014Darrell Proctor<\/strong> is a senior editor for POWER.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Government officials in the German state of Hessen (or Hesse) in March signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU)…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":64857,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5310],"tags":[2000,299,33241,33239,1824,33243,33242,1767,22750,33240,26401],"class_list":{"0":"post-64856","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-eu","9":"tag-europe","10":"tag-focused-energy","11":"tag-fusion","12":"tag-germany","13":"tag-hesse","14":"tag-hessen","15":"tag-nuclear","16":"tag-pilot","17":"tag-rwe-power","18":"tag-siemens-energy"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114430932630889415","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64856\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}