Fusion Research Pivots to Grid Delivery as CFS and Helion Take the Stage

Two of the best-funded private fusion developers will appear together at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco on 28 September, in a session titled "Bringing Fusion to the Grid." Commonwealth Fusion Systems co-founder and chief science officer Brandon Sorbom and Helion founder and CEO David Kirtley will speak on the Smart Systems Stage, according to TechCrunch. The conference runs 13 to 15 October at Moscone West.

The pairing is not ceremonial. Both companies have moved past laboratory milestones and are now negotiating the slower, less glamorous work of grid connection, regulation and customer contracts.

That shift is the real story in fusion research right now, and it explains why a startup conference listing has become a useful status report on the sector. The dossier does not contain independent verification of either company's technical claims, and the timelines come from the companies themselves or from TechCrunch's event copy.

What each company has actually built

Helion is developing Orion, a 50-megawatt fusion power plant intended to supply electricity to Microsoft as early as 2028, per TechCrunch. In February, the company said its Polaris prototype had heated plasma to 150 million degrees Celsius. In June, Helion announced a key regulatory milestone on the path to building and operating the plant. Its Series G funding round, initially announced at $465 million in June, closed at $500 million in September, TechCrunch reports.

CFS is building SPARC, a demonstration machine meant to pave the way for ARC, its first commercial power plant.

In April, the company became the first fusion firm to apply to PJM Interconnection, the largest US wholesale electricity market, a necessary step toward eventually connecting ARC to the grid. In July, it raised another $1 billion, bringing total funding to $4 billion. The two firms are pursuing different approaches, but both face the same question: scientific milestones do not automatically become electrons on a wire.

"Scientific milestones matter, but commercial fusion also has to make the leap to a functioning power plant capable of reliably delivering electricity to customers."

That framing comes from TechCrunch's own event description, not from either executive. Neither Sorbom nor Kirtley is quoted directly in the dossier material available.

The academic side is reorganizing too

While private companies chase power purchase agreements, universities are building the workforce pipeline those companies will need. Sixteen UK universities have joined the University Fusion Association under a new Memorandum of Understanding, establishing a transatlantic partnership focused on education and training, according to Quantum Zeitgeist. The agreement also covers collaborative research, technology development and science policy.

Professor Roddy Vann of the University of York's School of Physics, Engineering and Technology said the partnership is about keeping pace with industry. "We need this research and workforce to operate at a significant scale; however, we need to keep pace with industrial advances, and so joining forces with international collaborators is the best way to create the knowledge base required for long-term energy security," Vann said, according to Quantum Zeitgeist.

Matthew Lanctot, acting research division director at the US Department of Energy's Fusion Energy Services, said the partnership "will strengthen the publicly funded research base that drives fusion innovation while helping develop the talent and technology needed for a competitive private fusion sector." David Capper, director for net zero buildings at the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, added that delivering fusion "will require collaboration across academia, industry, and government, alongside a strong pipeline of skills and talent."

The Quantum Zeitgeist item carries no clear publication date in the dossier, and its source link points to a University of York news page. Treat the timing as approximate.

Research results keep arriving, but the grid is the bottleneck

Elsewhere in the dossier, fusion-adjacent research continues at a steady clip. A Chinese team from Hunan University of Technology published a numerical study in Case Studies in Thermal Engineering on compressed air energy storage, a different technology but one with a comparable engineering problem: how to store and release energy efficiently at grid scale. The researchers found that a linearly increasing air injection rate raised the energy storage rate from 85.5% to 87.5% compared with constant-rate injection, according to pv magazine. The same team validated its model against operating data from Germany's Huntorf CAES plant, with maximum differences of 2.66 K for temperature and 0.30 MPa for pressure.

That is not fusion. But it is the kind of work that decides whether a power plant, fusion or otherwise, can operate economically. The pv magazine report is dated 28 September.

On the policy side, the European Commission sent letters of formal notice to 18 EU member states on 28 September for failing to report full transposition of energy-sharing rules under Directive (EU) 2024/1711, pv magazine reported. The countries had until 17 July 2026 to enact the provisions. The commission has not yet assessed whether national rules conform to the directive, only whether transposition was notified.

Italy's energy regulator Arera, meanwhile, raised the MACSE energy storage auction premium cap from €22,000 to €27,000 per qualified MWh per year on 24 September, according to pv magazine. Researcher Mario Iovino told the outlet the cap rose because benchmark investment costs climbed from €125,000 to €150,500 per MWh, with WACC moving from 8.0% to 8.2%. Compared with the first auction, the cap is 27% lower.

The gap between milestone and megawatt

Fusion has spent decades as a promise. The current crop of developers is trying to convert that promise into interconnection queues, regulatory approvals and signed offtake agreements. Helion's Microsoft deal, targeted for 2028, is the most concrete public commitment in the dossier. CFS's PJM application is the most concrete regulatory step.

Neither guarantees that a plant will be built on schedule.

What the dossier does show is a sector that has stopped arguing about whether fusion works and started arguing about when it can be connected. That is progress of a specific, unglamorous kind. It is also the kind that determines whether the next round of funding, and the next generation of researchers, have somewhere to go.