The next generation of electricity is almost here

Greetings from the Lone Star State! I’m in Texas this week for the Breakthrough Energy Ventures Investors Summit. This is one of the best places in the world to see the future of energy, and I can’t wait to see how much progress has been made since my last visit.

There’s a lot on the agenda this week, but I’m especially excited to talk about electricity breakthroughs. By 2050, the world will need nearly three times as much power as we use today—and if we’re going to decarbonize the economy, we’ll have to electrify a lot of things that currently use fossil fuels. That means we need to deliver a huge amount of energy in a clean, reliable, and affordable way.

If you’re an electricity nerd like me, this is an exciting moment. Earlier this month, TerraPower—the next-generation nuclear power company I created in 2008—received federal approval to start building the nuclear reactor at its Kemmerer, Wyoming plant. Wind and solar are reportedly generating more electricity than fossil fuels in the EU for the first time. We’re seeing a clear shift as the world’s electricity system is becoming more diverse, more innovative, and more dynamic than ever before.

Here are three of the coolest technologies people will be talking about this week:

Geothermal. Geothermal power has been around for more than a century, but new approaches are unlocking greater potential for the technology. Most geothermal power plants today are located near the boundary between two tectonic plates, where you don’t have to drill as deep to find usable heat that can be pumped to the surface to turn a turbine and generate electricity.

Fervo wants to make geothermal an option in more places by both digging deeper (up to a mind-blowing 15,000 ft below the surface) and extending their wells horizontally at their deepest point. The results so far are super promising: Their pilot project has been consistently generating electricity since 2023, and their Cape Station plant in Utah will come online this year.

Fusion. Fusion is the reaction that powers the sun and stars, and it has the potential to be a virtually unlimited source of clean, safe electricity. Once the technology is fully commercialized within the next decade, it can be built anywhere, scaled up, and used to make huge amounts of electricity with no carbon emissions and minimal waste.

The question right now is how we get there. It seems likely that the first commercial fusion plants will use magnetic fields to harness the reaction to generate electricity. There are two different approaches to this: the tokamak, a donut-shaped machine that is easier to build but harder to keep stable, and the stellarator, a twist-shaped machine that is harder to build but easier to keep stable. (An unstable reaction can damage the machine but poses no risk to safety.) Commonwealth Fusion Systems is on track to turn on their SPARC tokamak next year, and Type One Energy is making great progress with their Infinity One stellarator. Marathon Fusion, Xcimer, and Zap Energy aren’t quite as far along with their approaches, but I’m optimistic about what they’re doing.

Geologic hydrogen. Hydrogen shows great promise as an energy source, and the discovery of geologic hydrogen is one of the biggest energy surprises of the past decade. Although it’s the earliest stage technology on this list, I’m excited about its potential. Geologic hydrogen is a zero-emission power source that is continuously generated underground by the Earth itself. Bourakébougou, a village in Mali, is powered by the small hydrogen field it sits on top of, and researchers have found deposits in the U.S., France, and other places.

This is an unusual technology to talk about because it’s hard to predict a timeline. It could take decades before geologic hydrogen becomes commercially viable at scale—or a company like Koloma or Mantle8 could find a massive deposit tomorrow, and then we’re off to the races. Once we find one really good source, it’ll be much easier to find the second because we’ll know exactly what we’re looking for.

If I could hop in a time machine and see what the future looks like a few decades from now, I would expect to see at least one of these technologies generating a significant chunk of the world’s power. It’s amazing to see so much progress being made in so many different areas, because it means that we’ll have options for how we generate affordable, reliable, clean electricity at the scale the future demands.