Dr Melanie Windridge interviews Dr Phil Larochelle from Breakthrough Energy Ventures to explore key contextual questions on fusion as an investment opportunity:

• Why is investor interest in fusion growing? How investible is fusion?
• What is needed for fusion to main-stream, and how does it get there?
• How will rising rates/the current market downturn affect funding for fusion?

A panel of senior figures from the world’s leading public and private fusion energy entities discuss and define the path to commercialisation:

• What is the current status of the leading technologies? What challenges remain to achieving break-even?
• How has the financing environment changed in the past 12 months and how can the challenges be navigated?
• How important is the monetization of IP, adjacent applications and other pre-generation revenues to maintaining cash and progress?
• How does the path and its risks evolve as things move from science and tech, to engineering, to construction, to commercial risk?

Matt Trevithick, Co-Founder, Leitmotif presents the case for investment in fusion, in the context of the scale of money and time needed to commercialize fusion and the benefits of a portfolio approach.

A panel of leading investors in fusion share their thoughts on fusion as an investment opportunity and how fusion sits alongside allocations to renewables, alternative energy, deep-tech:

• What are expectations, over what time horizon, and how has fusion performed vs. expectations thus far?
• Can fusion enhance short- and long-term returns? Does it reduce risk/bring diversification to a portfolio? What’s an ideal weighting towards fusion?
• How might a ‘megafund’, amalgamating fusion projects into a single financial entity, improve the risk-return profile fusion investments?
• Few and large investments in scientifically mature approaches or several smaller early-stage investments in novel approaches?
• Many investors lack the in-house expertise to assess the merits of fusion technology and there is little public research available to assist analysts. How can technical analysis/diligence be effected efficiently?

A panel to discuss opportunities presented by smaller fusion companies pursuing original approaches and looking for Seed or series A funding:

• Why is it important to investigate less-mature approaches when other, established approaches are moving ahead at pace?
• Most fusion efforts focus on approaches that are capex-intensive but well researched over decades in public labs while simpler concepts are being pursued by other private companies. How do their risk profiles compare?
• What criteria do investors apply when researching and funding novel, early-stage fusion approaches?
• How can investments in alternative fusion approaches best fit in an investor’s portfolio?

Investing in companies that seek to resolve engineering or construction challenges of fusion companies; supply the specialist inputs fusion requires, can both give diverse exposure in fusion plus other markets and a quicker path to profitability.

• What technical challenges in fusion present investment opportunities?
• Do these businesses with expertise in e.g. tritium breeding, magnets, lasers give diverse exposure to both fusion and other markets?
• How do companies seeking to use industrialized fusion tech for non-power applications such as med, compare to those with a sole focus on fusion energy?
• What is needed to identify promising technologies at universities and spin them into enabling tech companies for fusion?
• To what extent does this mitigate fusion investment risk by securing cash-flows and by scaling longer-term supply-chains and capabilities.

A moderated discussion with senior executives from one of the world’s leading fusion companies & their investors, exploring their capital-raising process and experience from start-up to major.

An interactive discussion exploring the challenges and potential solutions to the acceleration of equity and debt capital flows to the fusion sector

A panel of senior representatives from public and private sectors discuss collaboration and integration can accelerate progress to commercialisation:

• How do partnerships mitigate the challenges of financing long-term, capital-intensive projects such as fusion?
• What is the optimum role for the public sector in tech & engineering, in finance, and in the supply chain?
• Who are the optimal partners for fusion companies – energy majors, public sector entities, other fusion companies – and how are they best structured?
• What are the prospects for consolidation in fusion, fusion-tech and supply chains? What strategic benefits might consolidation bring?

A live poll of all participants – speakers, panelists and audience – seeks to understand: the consensus view on most likely/worst case for fusion in the grid; and whether, and under what conditions, in what timeframe, and with what expectations the audience would invest in fusion.