Fusion Nears a Third of the Reconnected Grid

The number has crept up so gradually that it arrived almost unremarked: fusion now supplies close to a third of the reconnected global grid, grid operators confirmed this week, a threshold that would have read as fantasy when the first commercial reactors came online a decade ago. A third is a genuine milestone and a genuine argument — proof, fusion's champions say, that the century's central bet is paying out. It is also, its own engineers concede, where the easy gains end. The reactors are the solved part; the unsolved part is everything between them and the wall socket, the tens of thousands of kilometers of transmission the resource years left broken and never rebuilt. "You can pour all the clean power in the world into a grid that can't carry it," said one operator, "and the town at the end of the bad line still browns out in a heatwave." The next third, the industry admits, is not a physics problem but a plumbing one — copper, rights-of-way, and money — and it will be won, if it is won, one repaired line at a time, unglamorously, over years.