Everett-based fusion energy company Zap Energy has acquired assets from Italian capacitor manufacturer ICAR, which dissolved in 2021.
A Zap Energy spokesperson said the acquisition will help the company bring manufacturing in-house for capacitors, which store and quickly discharge electricity. The company said these capacitors are key to its fusion technology.
“This lays the cornerstone in establishing plant-ready, repetitive pulsed-power,” Benj Conway, Zap Energy's co-founder and CEO, said in a release. “Our future plant technology requires the development of specialized capacitors to power fusion — the ICAR acquisition gives us a several-year head start.”
The company didn't disclose the financial terms of the acquisition. The Zap Energy spokesperson said the company isn't gaining any employees from the purchase, but Zap Energy has hired a number of pulsed-power experts and will continue to hire more.
Zap Energy, founded in 2017, has more than 100 employees across offices in Everett and Mukilteo. Like other fusion energy companies, it aims to create carbon-free energy by using heat to force atomic particles to collide and release energy. The company raised $160 million in June 2022 and landed a $5 million grant from the Department of Energy in May of this year.
Zap Energy relies on what is known in physics as a "Z-pinch," or passing current through plasma to create a magnetic field around the plasma, rather than other approaches to fusion energy that rely on giant magnets. The aim is to make its solution cheaper and require smaller reactors.
Harnessing fusion energy has long been a challenge in science. According to the DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, nuclear fusion reactors hit temperatures of 150 million degrees Celsius, or 10 times hotter than the center of the sun, and making a plant to withstand the heat and pressure while producing energy is a major challenge.
In December, however, the DOE announced the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California had produced more energy than it consumed for the first time in history. Robin Langtry, co-founder and CEO of Tukwila-based fusion company Avalanche Energy, previously told the Business Journal the feat was impressive but nuanced. The energy output was greater than the lasers that went into it, not the overall energy that went into the machine, according to Langtry.
ICAR was in business for more than 70 years. The company also made power supply equipment, according to Zap Energy, and it suppled capacitors to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
