Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a startup created out of a project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s research labs, announced plans this week to break ground on what it calls “the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant.” The plant is expected to come online in the early 2030s, according to the companywill be built in Chesterfield County, Virginia.

The plan is certainly an ambitious one, starting with how energy is produced. Nuclear fusion is a notoriously difficult process that involves the fusion of two lighter atomic nuclei into one heavier one, resulting in the release of a large amount of energy—it estimated to produce four times the amount of energy such as nuclear fission reactions. The reaction produced by nuclear fusion is the same type of reaction that powers the sun.

It’s not hard to imagine why one would want to harness the sun’s energy. It’s hard to actually, you know, do that, though. So far, nuclear fusion has proven elusive—at least in a way that produces usable energy. In 2022, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California reached nuclear fusion “ignition” for the first time, meaning they successfully produced excess energy from the reactions. Before the breakthrough, with since replicatedit takes more energy to make the reaction than the energy it comes from.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems have not yet achieved success in producing excess energy, every Futurism. In fact, the company has not yet finished building it small reactor which is designed to serve as a proof of concept for a larger future plant. That project will continue, but as the startup has decided to start working forward under the assumption that everything will work rather than checking the boxes first.

The company is promises that once this larger reactor comes online in Virginia, it will produce 400 megawatts of electricity—enough to power about 150,000 homes. That’s really cool! It also seems quite ambitious based on the 0 megawatts currently generated from the process.

There is a reason Nuclear fusion has proven to be very elusive for now, but maybe now that the seal is broken on the ignition, the developments in space will come fast and steady. With a reported $2 billion in funding behind it, Commonwealth Fusion Systems has as good a shot as anyone thought it would. And if it can’t, maybe it can figure out a way to use the energy from burning all that money.