GAMOW Highlights

On July 18, 2023, Chairman Brandon Williams of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee’s Subcommittee on Energy, Bipartisan Policy Center, and ClearPath hosted the ARPA-E Energy Innovation Showcase on the Hill in the Rayburn House Office Building.

Today, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced the first-ever achievement of “scientific energy gain” in a controlled fusion experiment. Scientific energy gain, a term used by fusion researchers, is the condition where fusion energy exceeds the input energy crossing the containment-vessel boundary, which encapsulates the plasma science of the experiment. In the case of the NIF specifically, scientific energy gain and the term “ignition” are used interchangeably (more on that below).

Dr. Ahmed Diallo currently serves as a Program Director for the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). His focus at ARPA-E is on potentially transformative research & development to enable commercial fusion energy.

Achieving sufficiently high energy gain is a requirement for the realization of fusion energy. The figures below illustrate progress towards energy gain and are the main results of a peer-reviewed publication [Physics of Plasmas 29, 062103 (2022); free download at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0083990] by ARPA-E Technology-to-Market (T2M) Advisor Sam Wurzel and ARPA-E Program Director Scott Hsu.

April 26-27, 2022 San Francisco, CA The ARPA-E Fusion Annual Meeting featured ARPA-E’s entire active fusion R&D portfolio, spanning 5 programs (OPEN 2018, Exploratory Topic in Fusion Diagnostics, BETHE, GAMOW, and OPEN 2021

On August 17, 2021, a New York Times article proclaimed a fusion energy release of 1.3 megajoules from 1.9 megajoules of incident laser energy, achieved at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The announcement of such a significant physics result rocked the fusion world, renewing discussions on R&D to enable commercially viable embodiments of laser-dri

At ARPA-E, we’re constantly thinking about what new white spaces we can explore in our mission to change how Americans get, use, and store energy. One key tool that we use to help design exciting focused programs is to issue periodic Requests for Information, or RFIs, which ask the research community to submit to us their best ideas for how we can have maximum impact on a specific technical space. RFIs help our Program Directors’ (PDs) build out their ideas.

January 21–22, 2021 The GAMOW (Galvanizing Advances in Market-aligned fusion for an Overabundance of Watts) program is kicking off!  As all 14 GAMOW projects are getting under contract, we are excited to introduce the project teams and their plans, as well as focus everyone’s thinking on the objectives of the program, with the help of some perspectives from invited speakers.

Update: July 2022After raising $27.5 million in their Series B fundraising round in May 2021, Zap Energy recently announced they raised an additional $160 million in follow-on funding. Lowercarbon Capital led their Series C funding round, with additional investors including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Shell Ventures, DCVC, and Valor Equity Partners. The Zap Energy team also announced a major technical milestone last month. Zap Energy created the first plasma in their FuZE-Q prototype.

For an agency mandated to look to the future – often far into the future – please allow a quick glance into this year so far.  Since the beginning of our fiscal year the agency which you know so well has continued to do what it does in extraordinary fashion – raise the bar through the efforts of all.  In this time, we have launched new programs, made changes in our recruiting and contracting approaches, had a number of successes in follow-on-funding and employed new approach to how we help tech move to market.