With the announcement of our new award from @ENERGY, now is the right time to take a look at its Milestone Based Fusion Development Program — its successes so far, and how it needs to dramatically expand if it’s to really fulfill its potential to speed clean, safe, secure fusion energy to the power grid. This week, we at Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced that a production version of our groundbreaking magnet technology passed our rigorous testing, clearing it for use in our SPARC fusion machine. The Department of Energy’s Milestone program validated our tests, confirming that the magnet is up to scratch and awarding CFS $8 million after we reached this milestone. It’s an important display of how the Milestone program can be effective: By validating our technology, stakeholders get assurance that we’re doing what we need to push fusion energy toward the nation’s electricity grid. With milestone-based approaches, the taxpayers don't bear any of the risks. If we don’t meet one of our milestones, the government doesn’t have to pay. If we were late or had to spend more than we expected, that’s our problem, and the government wouldn’t have to pay early or more than we agreed upon. It’s a good model. Milestone-based approaches are effective policy, and we know they work. Just look at the commercial space industry, which pioneered this approach at NASA. There, $788 million in federal investments — $1.2 billion in today’s dollars — helped build the US space industry to its present $143 billion annual market, sparking new industries like satellite-based broadband and emergency phone messaging. But with DOE’s Milestone program, we’re only in the first phase, and the federal government has only appropriated a small fraction of the $415 million it authorized to implement for a three-phase effort. Beyond that, we’d like to see the Milestone program expanded to accelerate the construction of fusion power plants through a demonstration phase. That could put the DOE’s Milestone program in the same league as NASA’s success. To read more, check our blog post on how to improve the Milestone program: blog.cfs.energy/department-o… #FusionEnergy #PowerMoves