Company attributes
Thea Energy is a developer of fusion energy technology using breakthroughs in stellarator physics and engineering with a view to create a faster and simpler approach to commercializing fusion energy. The company's proprietary approach works to eliminate the complex 3D magnet coils commonly used in stellarator designs and instead uses computer-controlled arrays of planar coils in the stellarator architectures.
Founded in 2022 by David Gates and Matt Miller as Princeton Stellarators, and renamed in 2023, Thea Energy is headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey. The company is building its stellarator architecture based on foundational research and technology development spun out from Princeton University and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. This research was led by David Gates, whose team designed and prototyped a scalable magnet array system, which would be the technological base of Thea Energy.
The stellarator technology has been used for a while, with the most popular version being the tokamak stellarator reactor. Thea Energy's stellerator technology eliminates the intricate 3D magnet coils required in other architectures, in part because these structures are difficult and expensive to manufacture, assemble, and maintain. Instead of these 3D magnet coils, Thea Energy's stellarator architecture uses modern electronic control systems which are simpler and less expensive to build while offering the same results.
This has led to the development of Thea Energy's Eos, a neutron source stellarator that Thea Energy claims is capable of commercial operation for the production of various isotopes and the first-generation system prototypical of a power plant.
