Is the world ready for the transformational power of fusion? 

Imagine:

One day in the early 2030s, an engineer at a newly constructed power plant near Richmond, Virginia, in the United States, will press a button. It will ignite the same reaction that takes place in our sun’s core.

Inside a doughnut-shaped machine called a 'tokamak,' hydrogen isotopes will collide at enormous speed, fusing into helium. This reaction will produce 400 megawatts (MW) of clean, firm electricity, enough for a small city. This electricity will hit Virginia’s power grid nanoseconds later, making nearby residents the first human beings to benefit from commercial fusion power generation.

By the time their children retire, fusion may be the world’s dominant energy source, ushering in an era of energy abundance, not scarcity. And it will be the cheapest reliable power, and incidentally, the cleanest power too.

Fusion is the future of the global energy sector — the near future. While it may not happen exactly as we’ve just described, the first fusion power plant will almost certainly begin operations shortly after President-elect Trump’s second term expires.

Two imperatives are reshaping the global energy market today: meeting exponential growth in demand, while achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. Fusion offers a path forward on both. Recent research, including MIT's first market analysis of fusion, projects fusion could surpass coal — which supplies 34% of global electricity — as the world's leading power source.

Yet, this is probably a conservative estimate. Fusion is zero carbon, safe, available 24/7 and the raw ingredients cover 71% of Earth’s surface: fusion plants get their hydrogen isotopes from seawater. With fusion, our oceans contain enough energy for billions of years.

Modelling the impact of fusion power — which has been compared to the discovery of fire and called "the last energy source humanity will ever need" — is challenging. But, by examining the science and markets, we can begin to understand how — and when — it could transform the world economy.

A thousand years passed between the first human flight — with 'wings' made from bamboo, silk, and feathers — and the Wright brothers. But once a powered flight worked, the progress in aviation soared: humankind reached the moon just 66 years later. Fusion is now developing at the same exponential rate.

Scientists have been conducting fusion reactions since 1952, but these reactions always consumed more energy than they produced. Then, in 2022, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California achieved 'Lawson’s criterion,' making the first net-positive energy gain from a controlled fusion reaction. It only lasted for a fraction of a second, but it proved fusion could be a power source, rather than a power drain. Now comes the next challenge: showing fusion can generate net-positive energy — what physicists call “Q>1” — in a commercially-relevant way.

More than 40 fusion startups are speeding towards this goal. Commonwealth Fusion Systems will turn on a demonstration power plant, called SPARC, in 2027. Scientists expect it will first achieve net-positive energy production (Q>1) and eventually generate up to ten times more energy than it consumes or more (Q>10). This will be fusion’s Wright Brothers moment.

What comes after could look like the space race, but this time we won't need seven decades to reach our moon.

The good news is that the world’s first commercial fusion power plant – a 400 MW machine we call 'ARC' – will break ground in the next few years. Last month, CFS, Dominion Energy and the Governor of Virginia made an historic announcement to site the world’s first commercial fusion power plant in Chesterfield County, Virginia. The future is here now.

One way to understand fusion's potential global economic impact is to look at a single market. That's what the MIT Energy Initiative did using New England's electrical grid as its case study.

New England, like most regions around the world, is investing in wind and solar. But these energy sources are inherently variable; the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine. This creates a challenge for grids: sometimes there's too much energy and sometimes there's not enough — and we don't yet have enough storage technology to capture and deploy the surplus.

Since fusion power is dispatchable and constant, it offers a solution while reducing costs. MIT found that incorporating fusion into New England's grid would cut annual energy costs by $36 billion — or 7% — by 2050. Extending this 7% price reduction across all energy consumption in the United States could save consumers $119 billion per year and help curb inflation, as energy costs are a significant driver of consumer prices. It could be a major source of global competitiveness.

As fusion power transforms the economics and geopolitics of energy, it will reshape industries and regions that need it most. Clean, firm fusion power is the keystone for reshaping hard-to-abate sectors — everything from steel, cement, chemicals, shipping and aviation. Fusion also is the critical driver for enabling exciting artificial intelligence applications powered by energy-hungry data centres.

Consider this: MIT's analysis shows that fusion power could increase global GDP by $68 trillion in a conservative scenario, or up to $175 trillion in a more aggressive scenario. While this boost to GDP could help wealthy nations grow amid high debt burdens and ageing populations, its greatest impact may be in regions like South Asia and Africa, where renewable power is sparse and electricity needs will grow nearly tenfold by the century's end. These areas also stand to benefit most — not just from abundant, clean and affordable energy, but from the positive externalities fusion will create for society: cleaner air, better water and improved human health and quality of life.

The 'first mover advantage' isn’t just about companies, it’s about countries too. From the United States to the UAE, governments are investing serious resources — in fusion R&D and commercialization. The United Kingdom made rapid progress since announcing its first fusion strategy in 2021 to delivering a £50m Fusion Industry Programme, while Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research is paving the way for the construction of the first fusion power plant on European soil.

While approaches vary by country, these governments share a common goal: deploy public funds to help researchers and entrepreneurs prove the technology and bring it to market. From there, fusion will naturally expand to markets where consumers need constant power and lack affordable clean alternatives — or where leaders have made ambitious climate commitments.

The world’s mindset will shift from energy as a constraint to limitless energy, reshaping the geopolitics of energy in its wake. The jump from fossil fuels to fusion energy will inevitably be more profound than the jump from burning wood to burning fossil fuels.

The global race for commercial fusion is on while the fusion-powered future is just beginning.