How Z-pinch could be the way ahead for fusion and clean energy

In this episode of the Decoding Innovation podcast series, Ryan Umstattd, VP of Product Development at Zap Energy, talks about the future of clean energy production through efficient fusion techniques.

Key takeaways:

Harnessing the power of self-generated magnetic fields for generating clean energy can be a game-changer for building commercially viable fusion plants.
Stabilizing the Z-pinch and keeping it going for longer periods can generate useful fusion reactions that can be utilized toward clean energy generation.
Density and temperature are the major challenges in stabilizing the Z-pinch within fusion reactors.

For your convenience, full text transcript of this podcast is also available.

Podcast transcript: How Z-pinch could be the way ahead for fusion and clean energy

41 mins 23 secs | 20 Jun 2023

Announcer

Welcome to the Decoding Innovation Podcast series brought to you by the EY-Nottingham Spirk Innovation Hub, where we explore the innovative technologies, business models and ideas that are shaping the future of industries. During each episode, Mitali Sharma, a principal in the EY-Parthenon Strategy practice, meets with stakeholders at the cutting edge to discuss innovations in their space, challenges they need to overcome and their outlook on the future.

Mitali Sharma

Hello and welcome. I'm your host Mitali Sharma, and today's topic is nuclear energy. We'll be talking to Ryan Umstattd. He is the Vice President of Product Development at Zap Energy. Zap Energy is a company that is focused on creating fusion reactors that are cheap, compact and scalable. We will be talking to Ryan about the challenges facing fusion, both in terms of technology and commercialization. Ryan, welcome to the show.

Ryan Umstattd

Thank you, Mitali. It's great to be here. I appreciate the invitation.

Sharma

Ryan, before we get into the specifics about nuclear fusion and Zap Energy's role in it, would you mind sharing with our audience your background and your journey so far?

Umstattd

Happy to. I was actually, science as an undergrad, was bitten by the physics bug back in high school and decided that was the way I wanted to go. Now, I wanted to also use that science for something interesting and I thought that trying it out in the Air Force would be interesting. So, I actually had a 20-year career in active-duty Air Force, doing science and technology development — everything from early-stage research on high-power microwaves to, toward the tail end of my career, looking at things that were closer to commercial or closer to operations, like new satellite and the ground system that goes with it, getting that operationally certified and handing the keys over to the end user. So that's where I really got this bug for working on first-of-a-kind technology. I left the Air Force but took the bug with me and went to the US Department of Energy, their Advanced Research Project Agency. So, I was able to help do “tech to market” for some of those early-stage advanced energy technologies with a focus on trying to find first market fit on the defense side. Defense is, of course, a big user of energy and has a strong interest in efficiency and improvements.
And so, there was an opportunity there to take early-stage energy technology and find the right fit over on the defense side. I was the Deputy Director for Commercialization during my last year of service there and then, I decided to go and make the jump into private sector. So, I've been with a couple of startups now and just joined Zap Energy about a year ago — again, making a big push to take this first-of-a-kind technology out of the lab and put it on a path to commercialize as quickly as possible. It's been a wild ride, but a lot of different expertise comes to bear when you're trying to tackle something like commercializing fusion energy.

Sharma

Ryan, I think since high school, we all know about fusion. Sun and stars as fusion energy. We were taught that it's basically the coming together of two nuclei, creates fusion and releases a lot of energy. However, fusion has generated a lot of interest in the recent years. Could you walk us through the history of fusion and how it's being utilized in the industry today, and your experience so far?

Umstattd

Sure, happy to. So, as you mentioned, we know that fusion works. We don't have to prove that it works because the stars shine. They have an advantage that we don't have here on Earth and that is really, really intense gravity. The main challenge to getting fusion energy to happen is to heat, compress and confine a plasma, which is a bunch of charged gas. The stars can do that because of an enormous gravitational field that pulls all of those nuclei together and gets them to this point where they can fuse. Here on Earth, we don't have that gravity. So instead, we've got to find other interesting ways to heat, compress and confine the plasma. Today, I'll probably end up using quite a bit of an analogy that relates back to the internal combustion engine because in a sense, we're still doing a very similar task and that is taking some fuel, getting it hot enough and dense enough so that it reacts, and then, getting a lot of energy out of that reaction. In your internal combustion engine, you're doing that with perhaps petroleum-based fuels and it's a chemical process. In fusion, we're using types of hydrogen atoms. We're getting the nuclei to join together when we heat and compress that fuel, and then, we get a burst of energy out that we can do extremely useful things with. We've been pursuing, humanity's been pursuing, making energy, productive energy from fusion since the 1950s. So, it's been several decades of steady progress.
There's a misconception out there that fusion is far away and it still remains far away. But I think there's, perhaps just not in the public perception, an awareness of the steady progress. Many folks have heard about Moore's Law. And then, that pace at which microprocessors and computers seem to pick up speed and reduce cost. When you look at the fundamental metric of how close we are to getting productive fusion energy out, that progress has actually been even faster than Moore's Law. In fusion research, we like to use what's called the triple product. I mentioned that you have to get something hot enough, dense enough for a long enough time for it to fuse. And so, you can take that time and temperature and density, and just multiply those together. And if you follow how strong, how large of a number that triple product is, that's a pretty good indicator of how close we are to getting to a point where we can have a plasma that actually has breakeven conditions, where the energy that you get out from fusion is even more than the energy that you put in. Across the world, we've been trying many different approaches. I think, the vast majority of governments have invested in large-scale magnetic confinement devices, like tokamaks or some of their cousins, and that's what we see being built today in France, is the ITER device, will be the largest tokamak ever constructed.
There are other approaches that use what's called inertial confinement, where maybe you have many laser beams that are actually firing onto a pellet and trying to compress and condense it very rapidly in order to get productive fusion reactions out. But the key takeaway here is that we know that fusion works. We know how to do it and we're trying to get to the point where we get more energy out than what we put into it. That's been the heart of the endeavor. I want to mention that if you look at that progress over time, we're getting very, very close through many different kinds of approaches to actually hitting that breakeven. So, I think we're getting pretty close to a Kitty Hawk Moment, if you will. So, there are companies like us that are trying to actually get our airlines launched, and up off the ground and start flying passengers around, even while we're still anticipating that Kitty Hawk Moment first.

Sharma

You mentioned three things: temperature, time and density. Have you made progress in one vs. other or they're all sort of interconnected?

Umstattd

They're somewhat interconnected. That's a great question. For these nuclei to get close enough together, they have to have enough energy so that they don't repel each other. And that's usually measured through the temperature. Temperature is kind of a good way of assessing how fast these nuclei are flying around, and will they have enough energy to actually meet each other and fuse. So, there’s sort of a floor on temperature. If you're too low in temperature, no fusion happens. If you at least hit that floor, you can start to get useful reactions. So, once you can heat things and get them hot enough, now it's a question of: How many of those hydrogen nuclei do you have around and how long do they stay close together? How quickly does the thing try to cool off? So, there does seem to be a relationship. Many times, you can see experiments where they achieved a very, very high-temperature plasma. Well, perhaps the density was relatively low or they did it for a very short period of time. It is a little bit of a Whac-A-Mole situation. You do really good on one parameter and the other one drops off. And so again, that is part of the challenge and the struggle is finding a way to get a Goldilocks set of parameters that keep the fusion, the plasma in a condition where it's ready to fuse and will do so. It'll process the fuel and give you lots of energy out.

Sharma

You also talked about net positive. Has anybody achieved net-positive energy?

Umstattd

There're a few different ways to define net positive, but the short answer is that nobody has done it in a way that it's been announced and accepted by the worldwide scientific community. So, we have to achieve breakeven. We'll have to go well beyond that. And that's the main point, it’s that, so even if we get to breakeven, that's actually not good enough to commercialize. We've got to get well beyond breakeven. So, breakeven will be a monumental achievement. That's why I think that it's going to be a lot of debate among the scientific community about what actually was achieved. But for fusion energy to commercialize, we have to get way beyond breakeven. So, we're going to hit breakeven and then, keep sprinting toward higher and higher performance, while others are perhaps still assessing what was the level of performance that was previously achieved and was it really a breakeven.

Sharma

Let's shift gears and talk about Zap Energy. Could we start with the history of Zap and the journey that it's gone through so far?

Umstattd

Sure. Zap Energy spun out from the University of Washington in 2017, about five years now. Prior to that, at the University of Washington, there had been about two decades of fundamental research and development that were funded by various government offices through grants, helping explore and mature the understanding of our approach to how we do fusion. So, they formed the company in 2017 and were able to garner initial government grants to help fund the early work and then, quickly move over towards more private funding. The company closed a Series A, B and C, basically, a year between each to the tune, where now we've raised about US$200m total in funding. Tackling fusion for energy is a big challenge and so we have a strong research and development team, but we've also built up a systems engineering team to help us look at the other aspects of how would you turn a working fusion reaction into the heart of a power plant. We have, of course, a business operations team to help make sure that the company is running smoothly, and start working with outside stakeholders, utilities, energy companies and such.

Sharma

A lot to unpack there. Let's start with the technology. What does Zap Energy use as its fuel source?

Umstattd

Good question. Almost all of the fusion approaches that have been deeply investigated have looked at using two special isotopes of hydrogen: deuterium and tritium. Deuterium is basically hydrogen, but it has an extra neutron and it's actually part of a naturally occurring hydrogen here on Earth. You can pull it literally from the seawater at a relatively small concentration and find just the deuterium atoms. The other fuel that we use is another isotope called tritium, that of course now has two neutrons and a proton in its nucleus. It's not naturally occurring. It actually has a half-life. It decays within 12 years with that half-life to become deuterium and helium-three. But those two fuels, basically deuterium and tritium, are what make up our fuel. Out in the future, a fusion power plant is going to for its fuel will be using deuterium and some lithium. With those two combined, you can make the deuterium and tritium. That's your actual fusion fuel.

Sharma

Do most companies use the same two fuels or is there something different?

Umstattd

That's a really good question. Deuterium and tritium are the most common fuels because they require the lowest temperature to get useful fusion reactions. There are other approaches out there that use more exotic fuels that are for higher temperatures, like protons plus boron-11 or a deuterium and a helium-three atom. They look at those other approaches, mostly because those other approaches produce fewer neutrons. Neutrons are something that we have to deal with when you're dealing with fusion energy. They carry lots of energy and they can actually help degrade materials over time. So, there's an interest in doing these more exotic higher-temperature fuels because you can reduce the amount of energy that's carried by high-energy neutrons. But for now, it's going to be, it's clear to me that deuterium and tritium are like the first steps. Let's learn how to use that fusion fuel, get really good at it and then, we can move on to even higher-temperature fuels that maybe make the neutrons less of an issue to deal with.

Sharma

Let's get into Zap Energy's unique approach to creating the fusion reactors. Could you talk about the “Z-pinch” technology?

Umstattd

I mentioned earlier that the main challenge of getting fusion energy out is to heat, compress and confine the plasma. Around the world, there're examples of people building really large devices to either do it with exotic magnetic field — a very large, expensive magnet — or perhaps large, expensive and inefficient lasers. At Zap Energy, we actually use neither of those. What we're using is the self-generated magnetic field that's experienced by anything that's conducting a current. So, when you have a plasma, that's a bunch of charged particles, and you flow a current through it, that creates a magnetic field around that plasma. Now, those charged particles are moving and so, that can create a force. The magnetic field actually causes those charged particles to squeeze in. What might have started as a thick, fat blob of plasma, the more current you push through it, the skinnier and skinnier and skinnier that gets. So, what we're doing is we're using a Z-pinch. Z is just for the standard name of that third axis.
We flow a lot of current and what was a fat blob of plasma becomes almost as thin as a hair filament, and yet it's carrying many, many hundreds of kiloamps of current. It gets squeezed to the point where it's extremely hot, extremely dense and can create useful fusion reactions. Now, historically, we've known about the Z-pinch since the 1950s, but they have a tendency to, there's a natural instability that causes that hair filament of plasma to rip itself apart within nanoseconds. The innovation of Zap Energy has been to find a way to stabilize that Z-pinch so that it doesn't fly apart in nanoseconds. In fact, we've managed to get Z-patches stable for over 1,000 times longer than they should be relative to the previous well-known experiments and theories. We use what's called sheared flow in order to help stabilize that Z-pinch. It has a long enough duration that we can get lots of useful fusion reactions out.

Sharma

Talk to us more about the sheared flow.

Umstattd

Sure. The sheared flow, the way that we stabilize it, imagine now, if you will, you're driving down a freeway in multi-lanes. If everybody around you is going about the same speed, it's kind of easy to get in and out of your lane. If people start going really fast or really slow compared to you, it's a lot harder to get out of your lane and that's what we're doing with the plasma. We've got the central part of the plasma that's going along at one speed. But just outside of that, we've got a layer of plasma that's moving at a different speed. And outside of that, a layer of plasma that's moving at a different speed. Now, if that plasma in the center is trying to get out of its lane and break apart this filament, it can't do so very easily because these other layers are helping keep it confined. So that's really how we can keep the Z-pinch going for a much longer duration as it gets hotter and denser, and makes more and more fusion reactions.

Sharma

Typically, you said Z-pinch lasts how long?

Umstattd

Oh, so they often fly apart within tens of nanoseconds. We found that in our approach, we can get durations that are many hundreds of microseconds, so more than a thousand times longer. For a power plant, we think that we should be able to get useful fusion reactions with just about 100 microsecond duration or so, should be sufficient for a power plant.

Sharma

And you're within striking distance of that?

Umstattd

That's right. Duration is not the biggest problem that we face right now. I think our challenges are more in density and temperature. But I think the duration we’ll be able to, the confinement time and the duration for the pinch, we'll be able to manage those.

Sharma

In terms of the physical device, what is required to actually create the Z-pinch and the sheared flow stabilization process that you mentioned?

Umstattd

The heart of what we do at Zap Energy relies upon a vacuum chamber. To make a plasma, first you typically want to get all of the other gases out of the way and have just the gas that you're interested in. It's inside a metallic vacuum chamber. We have to pull out most of the air and inject just our fuel gas. How we do our shear flow and stabilize Z-pinch has a lot to do with the geometry inside of that vacuum chamber because that controls how the fuel gas flows. Then, we apply an electrical pulse to that gas in order to give it some energy and create some current flow, and get it to start squeezing and getting hotter and denser. And then, we have to catch that energy. But it's not that dissimilar from what you might see in an internal combustion engine, where a lot of what happens has to do with the geometry of the cylinder, the way that you inject the fuel gas and then, applying some sort of spark or something to get the reaction started.

Sharma

Could you compare and contrast the amount of energy required in your process versus other methodologies within fusion or maybe compared to fission?

Umstattd

I'll look at fusion first. As I mentioned, there're a couple of mainline approaches that are pursued around the world in large government experiments, like using large magnetic fields or high-energy lasers. The idea is all about trying to maximize the efficiency with which you can deliver energy to the plasma. If you do it with lasers, you pay a big price because the laser from the wall plug isn't that efficient. If you do it with magnetic fields or other microwave devices, again, they're not quite as efficient because you have to first generate that from wall plug. Because we're directly flowing current through our Z-pinch, it's got one of the highest efficiencies for coupling energy to the plasma that you can get. You'll literally almost go straight from the wall plug to just changing that electrical, that AC current into something that's more of a pulse — higher current, higher voltage but shorter duration — and deliver that electrical energy directly to the plasma without having to go through a conversion into laser light, or a conversion into other forms of microwaves or radio frequencies.

Sharma

When we first started, you talked about the fact that you're trying to achieve something that's not just efficient, but also cost effective, compact and scalable. Talk to us about that.

Umstattd

Sure. Clearly, we've got to de-risk the science and technology by proving that you can get more energy out than you put into this fusion plasma. But now, we have to look at this from a business perspective of, “Okay. What's my capital cost to build that device and how am I going to recoup that capital cost in a commodities market?” You're competing against “cents per kilowatt hour” and “dollars a gallon” but you've got this brand-new shiny device. There's nothing fundamental about how we do this that requires anything in terms of exotic materials or extremely expensive components. When we look at the overall economics of a fusion power plant in terms of its fuel costs, fuel costs for most fusion approaches, including Zap, that look like they're going to be less than 1% of the revenue that you could generate from selling electricity, so that the fuel isn't really a driver. It's more about, “What are your raw materials? What's going to be your maintenance cycle? What waste stream do you have?” All of those right now are looking fairly reasonable for the Zap Energy approach. I'm encouraged by the fact that for our technology, a lot of it are things that are commercially available.
We just haven't necessarily put them together in this way, shape or form yet, relative to things that we've seen from their traditional vision industry and their challenges with waste. We know that from fusion, it's possible to actually create only low-level waste that actually decays within decades instead of hundreds of years or millennia, and that there's already storage facilities in the US that are ready and willing and capable of receiving that low-level waste. We feel like from the input to the outputs, we've got a relatively solid chance at doing something that's going to be feasible and affordable.

Sharma

How compact are these reactors?

Umstattd

Our natural size for a Zap Energy fusion heart is it makes a Z-pinch that's about a half-a-meter long. In volume, basically a vacuum chamber and reaction chamber that's about three meters by three meters. There's, of course, the rest of the power plant that has to do with applying the pulses and also, we catch that energy in a flowing, liquid metal blanket. That flowing, liquid metal blanket is also our heat transfer fluid that then allows us to spin a steam turbine, most likely in the early versions of a Zap power plant. We would be basically the heat source that would replace something, like a traditional fission source or a carbon-based fuel that you're burning in order to drive a steam turbine, and make useful electricity in that way.

Sharma

For sure. You also talked about the fact that this is a huge problem and you are approaching this as the supplier of the heat source. So, how are you thinking about convening the ecosystem?

Umstattd

I think that when a fusion approach is perhaps fast enough in their development cycle, small enough in size and small enough in costs, such as we are at Zap Energy, I think it makes a lot of sense for us to at least consider a build-own-operate model. We haven't made a final decision about the actual go-to market strategy, but if we look at a build-own-operate model, that means that we need to now flesh out a team that isn't just an expert in the plasma physics of the fusion we get from the Z-pinch, but we need to basically work with others to flesh out a team that can build a power plant and get connected to the grid, and manage the day-to-day operations of a power plant. A lot of those conversations are happening now. We're reaching out to folks in the energy and utility space to understand who are the right teams to work with that have the experience to building community-scale power plants at a municipal level. Who are the right folks to work with the regulatory bodies to make sure that we can get interconnections to the grid and things like that? And so, it's exciting because it really broadens the skill set that's working to get Zap Energy on the grid.

Sharma

In your opinion, what's the timeline between now and when this — the ability to have nuclear fusion as a viable source becomes a reality?

Umstattd

We set ourselves some pretty aggressive goals and targets at Zap Energy and thus far, we've been able to hit them. When we look at when could we possibly soonest commercialize, our target is to have fusion electricity available to the grid in the early 2030s. It's bold. It's aggressive. But we've got the team put together now that's going to take a big swing at it.

Sharma

Let's shift gears to commercialization. At the beginning of the conversation, you had said that you are now focused on making sure that this unique technology is commercialized. You've taken a lot of steps in that. Obviously, you've done a lot of fundraising. Walk us through that journey.

Umstattd

Sure, yes. Again, fusion, the science and technology, when it was born, it was born with an application in mind. Generations, now, of scientists and engineers have worked on fusion, knowing that the idea is for it to become a clean, nearly limitless supply of energy for everyone on the planet. And so, there's always been sort of that applied bent to the research that's going on, especially within the last 10 years or so. Now, there's been not just an applied research bent, but a whole effort to start getting the ecosystem ready for fusion to commercialize. What we're seeing now isn't just research that's gone from lab bench and being scientific to being more applied. We're actually seeing, what I believe is going to be the birth of a whole new sector in our economy as fusion begins to commercialize. Yes, it's going to create some changes in the energy sector, but that's going to ripple throughout the entire economy. Imagine basically a fuel energy source, electricity source, whether it's heat or electricity, that you can place almost anywhere on the planet. No longer is a country's fate determined by the oil reserves underneath the ground. When you can go with a safe power source closer to population centers, well then now, you don't need nearly as much investment in the high voltage transmission, in terms of stretching an energy infrastructure and making it not just expensive, but also potentially less resilient to the climate change or other disasters that can take down transmission lines.

Sharma

Ryan, you talked about the competitors shrinking. We also know that there is a challenge in keeping the momentum while you are trying to raise funding, which investors and entrepreneurs sometimes call the Death Valley. It's the time between having a product and then, commercializing the product. So how are you thinking about that? Is that a concern that you're worried about?

Umstattd

Right. Yeah, good question. Clearly, having a broad playing field can make it challenging to find the right investors and help those investors make the right decisions about where to put their funds. The scale of the problem that we're trying to tackle here is the world's electricity supply. And that's many, many terawatts of electricity. Now, when you build power plants, a useful capital cost metric is how many dollars per watt of a power plant. If we're talking about terawatts of generation that need to be built, that's trillions of dollars of investment that are going to need to be made to put a new electricity infrastructure out there. And so, that's going to be a large amount of investment that's going to be needed. Now the question is, where does it come from and how many players is it split among? I think that for the sake of efficiency, we're going to end up, not just for the sake of efficiency, but also just the underlying support of the physics, which approaches to fusion energy are actually going to produce sufficient gain to make a power plant and as that field narrows due to other approaches not working out, I think we'll also see that the ones that do work, it's how quickly can they scale and how efficient are they at now entering the market and meeting market needs. That's going to really help collapse the number of places that investors in clean electricity would want to put their funds. So, I do think that, as you mentioned, it might help us get across a valley of death if we start to see that there're a little bit fewer options for fusion companies in terms of investment, and because of either their technological approach or the speed with which they're able to scale and actually deliver their solution to the market.

Sharma

As you think about the commercialization of Zap Energy's core technology, how did you get investors interested in something that's a little bit away still in terms of return on investment?

Umstattd

Great question, Mitali. I think that there's always the balance between the reward, the potential reward that's out there and the risk. Of course, everyone's going through that mental calculation of how likely is this to happen. But what is the upside, when and if it does? I think that we've been able to help investors through that by showing them very specific stage gates or milestones in terms of improving the performance of our technology and basically showing that as we de-risk the science methodically, that's leading to step changes in the overall valuation of the company. I think Zap Energy has a huge advantage on that front. Many other approaches are so complex that it's hard to communicate outside of fusion plasma physicists about your progress. But at Zap Energy, because we use Z-pinch and so much of the performance of our Z-pinch correlates very directly with how much current we can push through the Z-pinch, we can use current as an extremely useful milestone of progress that we can communicate clearly with those inside science and those outside as well. As we continue to ratchet up the current, we can push through the pinch. We're getting closer and closer to useful fusion energy reactions, and that's de-risking the science in a way that makes investors comfortable with that next round.

Sharma

Interesting. Are you mostly approaching the funding process from grants and government, or you've gone to the private sector also?

Umstattd

When the company first spun out of the University of Washington, two of the cofounders had already had Department of Energy grants to fund it while it was at the University. As the company spun out, they started to interact more with the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy, ARPA-E. They also do things that are similar to grants, but they add an emphasis on commercialization of the technology that they fund. And that, I think, really helped pivot the company toward private funding. Since 2019, nearly all of Zap Energy's resources have been provided through private funding. A series of investment rounds — A, B and C — again helped along by having very specific milestones that are challenging and yet then, the team meets. We basically set a schedule, set an ambitious goal, achieve it, and that shows that we're de-risking the technology and helps close decisions on fundraising.

Sharma

You said that the company has grown very rapidly in the last five years from basically two or three people, including the founders, to now 90 or so. How has the company changed and as it's changed, how have you started pivoting toward more operational issues?

Umstattd

It's been a whirlwind, I tell you. I joined the company a little over a year ago as employee number 30 and then, we almost tripled in the following year. It was kind of, it's been a surprise for me that we could actually grow that fast, and still be so effective at setting and meeting our technical milestones. But it's been really exciting to see the progress we're making while we're still growing.

Sharma

As there's more interest generated in the field, do you expect more competition to come in?

Umstattd

That's a really great question as well. There are several companies right now, around the world, there're probably over 30 private companies that are each pursuing commercialization of fusion energy. Most of those companies actually have, are coming at it from a different technical angle. There're many different ways to try to heat, compress and confine this plasma. Clearly, not all of them are going to work. The million-dollar question or the billion-dollar question is which ones will and which ones won't. Again, Zap Energy has managed to methodically de-risk our approach along the way and we're on a solid path to continue that. I don't think that we're going to see many several different fusion companies all hitting success. If I had to look in a crystal ball, I would say that many of them are not going to succeed and we're going to see a shrinking, if you will, in terms of the playing field. We will see a handful, at most, of companies who've actually achieved a breakeven and beyond, and then, have a solid shot at commercializing the technology.

Sharma

Let's talk about your approach toward intellectual property (IP). Typically, patents have a lifetime of 20 years. As we are talking about fusion, it might or might not materialize in the next 20 years. So, what's your approach in creating and keeping your differentiation in the market?

Umstattd

While our cofounders were still at the University of Washington, they were partnering with Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and they actually filed and were granted a few foundational patents around how we use the sheer flow to stabilize this Z-pinch. Zap Energy now has the license to those patents. But as we built out the expertise on our team, we're finding that there are more and more aspects of how you make this practical, and how you turn it into eventually a power plant, so that we're able to continue to file patents along the way. As you mentioned, there may be concerns about expiration of some of the earlier patents, but I'm convinced that along the way, we're finding so many new innovations that help improve things, that we'll be able to keep a solid IP portfolio all the way through commercialization and beyond.

Sharma

How easy is it to replicate any of this technology?

Umstattd

Because a lot of it is based on foundational science, a lot of those folks typically go to conferences and publish. The idea of science is to be able to write a paper such that someone can read it and reproduce your results. So, there is that aspect of it. But I think that as we see many of these fusion approaches get absorbed into a company, there's a little bit less of that complete, open sharing going on, where there's some secret sauce, almost a trade secret, if you will, approach to, “Yes. I'll tell you what my device looks like, but I'm not going to tell you exactly how I operate it, because that is my secret sauce.” I think that's what we're seeing a lot in fusion with these companies, is that much of the foundational research is published, but that there're key details that are kept within, inside the companies.

Sharma

Are there any inherent limitations in nuclear fusion which might prevent it from becoming widespread?

Umstattd

As a community, the fusion committee has been trying to get to breakeven for so long that a lot of people have fixated on just getting to breakeven and they're worried that that's some sort of ceiling or limit to how well the plasma is going to perform. But there's nothing in the physics that says that once you hit breakeven, that that's the maximum energy you can get out. So, I don't see a fundamental limit there. Knowing that the fusion fuel is so readily available around the world, that again heartens me that I don't think we're going to run into a limitation on that front either. I think, as long as we do the proper engineering to make sure that these systems are safe and sustainable and scalable, I think we can see a world in the near future where people are willing to invite fusion power plants into their, if not backyards, into their communities and that everyone would have access to electricity generated from fusion energy, no matter where you are on the planet. You're not limited by the wind or the Sun or the fuel that's available.

Sharma

Are you primarily focusing on energy generation for use, or are you also thinking about other uses for fusion and your approach?

Umstattd

The eventual target market for fusion is electricity, simply because it's such a huge market globally and because there're really good reasons for us to replace much of that existing electricity generation. Along that path though, as I mentioned, it's hard to enter a commodities market with a brand-new technology. So, we're definitely looking for those high-value early adopters, those beachhead markets. Whether that's something like a US Department of Defense military base, where they have an interest in energy resilience and so, they're willing to maybe sign a contract with a slightly higher than commercial power rate. Or perhaps, it's a data center, where they have a vested interest in cleaning up their energy supply and they're willing to be the first of a kind of adopter of a new technology just for the sake of having now clean electricity available nearby to power their data centers. Then, of course, naturally, there's going to be places around the world today that have higher than average electricity rates. So, we will, of course, be looking at those markets as potential early adopters simply because they help the economics pencil out.

Sharma

You talked about the fact that you grew so rapidly surprised you. Were there any other surprises?

Umstattd

I've been surprised along the way. The serendipity. As someone who's been in and around fusion, but not directly working on it for decades, I tend to think that when you're doing fusion, it's really hard and you should always expect everything to go wrong. And yet, I got to Zap Energy and things were going right. We were growing fast and still being productive. The funding rounds were bringing in new investors with new expertise to the team. Everyone, from energy strategics now to those that are focused on climate investing, and even investors that come from the energy and utilities space. Having that come together, the leadership team that Zap Energy has managed to attract, again, I feel like it's kind of a perfect storm and things keep going in our favor. So, I keep expecting that to stop at some point and it doesn't. So that's been exciting and definitely surprising for me.

Sharma

Definitely an exciting time. What keeps you up at night?

Umstattd

When I think about what worries me most is, gosh, I wish we could go even faster. That's the thing. How do we speed this up? Because everywhere I go after we've had a conversation about what is fusion energy and what’s Zap Energy working on, the question that I always end every conversation is people asking me, “How soon can we get it? Can you go faster?” So that's the thing that I'm looking for opportunities. What we're doing is a monumental challenge, but we've got the right team. We've now got access to the resources to do it. So, let's go heads down and let's go as fast as we can.

Sharma

This has been certainly a very interesting conversation. Ryan, is there something that I haven't asked you?

Umstattd

I think we've covered it all. It was a pleasure to speak with you today, and walk through everything from the science and technology to the commercialization, and who's doing what in fusion energy.

Sharma

Fantastic. Anyways, thank you so much, Ryan.

Sharma

On December 13, 2022, U.S. Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration announced the achievement of fusion ignition at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This podcast episode was recorded prior to that announcement.

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The Decoding Innovation podcast series is a limited production of the EY-Nottingham Spirk Innovation Hub, based in Cleveland, Ohio. For more information, visit our website at ey.com/decodinginnovation. If you enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe. Leave a review wherever you get your podcasts and be sure to spread the word.
The views of third parties set out in this podcast are not necessarily the views of the global EY organization or its member firms. Moreover, they should be seen in the context of the time they were made.

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Mitali Sharma
Former host, Decoding Innovation podcast

Ryan Umstattd
VP of Product Development, Zap Energy

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Episode 12

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41m 23s

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EY refers to the global organization, and may refer to one or more, of the member firms of Ernst & Young Global Limited, each of which is a separate legal entity. Ernst & Young Global Limited, a UK company limited by guarantee, does not provide services to clients.

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