Proxima Fusion, RWE and IPP target Germany’s first commercial stellarator

Technicians install components inside Wendelstein 7-X’s plasma vessel during 2025 maintenance, highlighting the stellarator engineering that Alpha will build upon at IPP’s Garching site. 

(Image courtesy of MPI for Plasma Physics, Ben Peters)

Proxima Fusion has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Free State of Bavaria, RWE, and the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, setting out a two-stage path from scientific demonstration to grid-connected power. The agreement formalises a roadmap that begins in Garching and is intended to end at a decommissioned fission site 80 kilometres to the northwest.

The first stage is Alpha, a demonstration stellarator to be sited adjacent to IPP’s campus in Garching and targeted for operations in the 2030s. Alpha is not a power plant. It is designed to become the first stellarator to achieve net energy gain, producing more energy from its plasma than it consumes, and to validate the magnet systems, diagnostics, and plasma control under conditions that compress the development timeline for Stellaris. IPP’s scientific director Sibylle Günter confirmed at the signing that Alpha and Wendelstein 7-X are conceived as complementary programmes. W7-X, which on 22 May 2025 closed its OP2.3 experimental campaign having set a world record for triple product in long plasma discharges and reached 1.8 GJ in a 360-second discharge, continues to demonstrate that stellarators can sustain plasma continuously. Alpha will not run long pulses but will instead scale plasma confinement to heat loads relevant for a power plant, something W7-X was never instrumented to do.

The follow-on plant, Stellaris, is planned for Gundremmingen, where RWE is currently decommissioning its last fission reactors. Existing grid connections, cooling infrastructure, and a site with established regulatory history for large nuclear facilities all carry practical weight in a licensing process for fusion that no European country has yet fully worked through. Under the MOU, Proxima leads engineering and procurement, IPP provides plasma physics and scientific direction for Alpha, and RWE contributes large-plant construction experience and its industrial network. Gundremmingen is also being evaluated as a potential location for magnet manufacturing during the Alpha construction phase, which would give Proxima early production volume in a technology area where European industrial capacity is currently limited.

Alpha carries a total budget of €2 billion. Proxima intends to fund approximately 20 percent through private international investors. Bavaria has indicated a potential state contribution of a matching 20 percent, subject to federal support under Germany’s High-Tech Agenda, an €18 billion strategic programme that includes over €2 billion allocated to fusion under a Fusion Action Plan signed by the German cabinet on 1 October 2025. RWE has signalled willingness to participate financially within the MOU framework. All four partners are combining their positions to improve the chances of securing that federal commitment, which remains outstanding. The industrial consortium assembled to deliver Alpha’s manufacturing – covered here when it was announced the day prior – adds further weight to the argument that this programme has moved beyond partnership declarations into supply chain organisation.

Whether Alpha reaches operations in the 2030s at the stated budget, and whether Stellaris follows on any timeline that matters commercially, depends on federal funding decisions not yet made, on regulatory frameworks for fusion that remain undeveloped, and on engineering challenges in high-temperature superconducting magnets that are real. What the MOU establishes, with more structural substance than most fusion partnership announcements carry, is that the institution with the deepest operational stellarator knowledge in the world, a major European utility with demonstrated large thermal plant construction capability, and a state government prepared to put hundreds of millions of public euros on the table are all pointing at the same two sites in the same sequence. That is a different kind of signal to a press release.

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