Fusion power startup Zap Energy pulls a partial pivot, adding nuclear fission to the mix

The biggest U.S. power grid is under strain from AI — and no one is happy

Pity the PJM Interconnection. For decades, the grid operator worked quietly and in the background, matching electricity demand with supply. Meanwhile, customers enjoyed some of the lowest electricity prices in the United States.

No longer. Politicians, businesses, households, power companies think it needs an overhaul. Even PJM is in agreement.

PJM released a white paper this week that said the region “has years, not decades” to make fundamental changes to the way it operates. “The current situation is not tenable,” PJM CEO David Mills wrote in a foreward to the report.

Normally, this sort of wonky report would land on the desks of a few legislators and regulators. But PJM’s territory includes a large number of data centers, including the compute-dense region of Northern Virginia. What happens to PJM will send ripples throughout the tech world.

The 70-page report is an exercise in navel gazing. But despite the deep introspection, not everyone is convinced the organization is up to the task of overhauling itself. One utility, American Electric Power, is considering pulling out of PJM altogether.

“The current state of PJM’s performance and stakeholder approval process does not give me great confidence that these issues will be resolved anytime soon,” Bill Fehrman, AEP’s CEO, said in an earnings call Tuesday. “In fact, if something is not done now, I expect we could still be having these same conversations in 10 years. The PJM market worked very well when supply exceeded demand, we are now in a very different time.”

Here’s what changed

Cloud computing and AI have begun to strain PJM’s existing generating capacity. Against the backdrop of surging demand, PJM paused applications in 2022 for new generating sources to connect to its grid, citing a years-long backlog. Just as the need for electricity was beginning to grow for the first time in decades, the grid operator prevented new sources from even applying to get hooked up.

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PJM isn’t entirely to blame for the lengthy backlog. Many interconnection requests are duplicates — developers will propose essentially the same project in different grid regions to see which gets approved first. PJM’s sclerotic approval process meant that of the more than 300 gigawatts worth of projects in the queue in 2022, only 103 gigawatts ended up signing agreements, and only 23 gigawatts have been connected so far. Most developers withdrew rather than wait it out.

The biggest U.S. power grid is under strain from AI — and no one is happy

No longer. Politicians, businesses, households, power companies think it needs an overhaul. Even PJM is in agreement.

Here’s what changed

Techcrunch event

San Francisco, CA

October 13-15, 2026

Moment Energy raises $40M to meet infinite demand for power with EV batteries

Moment Energy CEO Edward Chiang believes demand for power in North America is infinite — and that his startup has the solution.

The company, which has headquarters in Canada and the United States, takes a novel approach to repurposing electric vehicle batteries, Chiang told TechCrunch. The company’s approach is special, he said, because of its dual focus on safety and modularity.

Investors apparently agree. On Tuesday, Moment Energy announced it has raised a $40 million Series B funding round, bringing its total funding to more than $100 million. The round was led by Canadian VC firm Evok Innovations, with additional funding from grocery retailer fund W23, joining existing investors like Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund and In-Q-Tel, the CIA-funded VC firm.

In Chiang’s view, the electric grid in North America is in a losing race to keep up with this demand for power, driven by an increasingly extreme climate, the rise of electric vehicles, and the data center boom. So far, he says mostly Chinese companies have filled this demand — to the tune of about 72% of the global market, according to BNEF — adding a national security wrinkle to the picture.

Moment Energy is tackling this by taking battery packs from electric vehicles, ripping out the automakers’ battery management systems, and writing its own software to manage the packs. It then packages the battery modules into larger grid-scale storage solutions that can host a wide mix of battery chemistries, allowing customers to benefit from future advances in the technology while also reducing downtime if a particular module fails.

Crucially, Chiang said, Moment Energy is doing this all with UL Certification, making it the first company to repurpose batteries with a stamp of approval from the safety organization.

Chiang said other companies working on repurposing EV batteries for long-term storage often claim that they test their products against UL certification standards, but that they don’t actually obtain the certifications, which requires the use of certain components.

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“What most other second life [battery] companies are now trying to say is, let’s just lobby to make second life UL certification easier, because it is impossible to get UL certification, as it stands,” he said. “But at Moment, we say that’s not true. We got it.”

UL certification may sound boring, but Chiang said it can make a difference not only when it comes to safety, but also in how these energy storage products are insured.

He claimed (without naming them) that other energy storage companies will leave an automaker’s battery management system in tact on the re-used batteries, and essentially trick the pack into thinking it’s still on the road to coax the right amount of discharge.

This could make these storage solutions either uninsurable or too costly to insure, Chiang said. He pointed to Liberty Mutual’s venture arm participation in Moment Energy’s Series B as proof that his company’s solution is above board.

“Maybe as engineers, or as consumers, we think that’s kind of interesting,” he said. “In reality, fire inspectors don’t think that’s interesting. Automakers don’t think that’s interesting. You can imagine if — I really hope this never happens — but if a battery catches fire, the fire inspector will say, ‘Oh, hey, there’s a Tesla battery management system in here, or there’s a Nissan battery management system in here,’ and the automaker will say: ‘I’ve never given permission for anybody to hack and bootleg my safety systems.’”

Chiang’s confidence seems to come from a number of places. Despite being small — Chiang said Moment Energy has around 72 employees — the company has signed supply deals with Mercedes-Benz and Nissan. It secured a $20 million loan from the Department of Energy. And it’s building a gigawatt-scale factory in Austin, Texas.

Moment also has a growing book of diverse customers, from utilities, to industrial companie

Fusion power startup Zap Energy pulls a partial pivot, adding nuclear fission to the mix

Nobody said building a fusion power plant would be easy. Physicists and engineers have been working for decades to crack the problem. But over the last year or so, fusion startup Zap Energy took a deeper look at its pathway to a working power plant and decided that it would be quicker to build a fission power plant first.

Wait, what?

“Fission and fusion are two sides of the same coin,” Zap’s new CEO Zabrina Johal told TechCrunch. “They have so many challenges that are congruent with each other.”

Zap is among the better-funded fusion startups, having raised more than $300 million, so this partial pivot holds some shock value, no matter how many synergies exist between fission and fusion.

It starts to make more sense against the backdrop of rising energy demand from AI data centers, which is expected to nearly triple by 2030. Tech companies want electricity today, and one of the challenges facing every fusion startup is that grid-ready power plants won’t be ready for several more years — likely a decade or more.

“There is not enough power and energy in the world to build all the data centers that are needed,” Johal said. “It just meant we need to pull this in faster, we need to get something that’s relevant to the grid today.”

Two ways to split an atom

Fission is commercially viable in a way that fusion is not. Fusion is the practice of fusing two light atoms like hydrogen, which also releases energy. One experiment has been able to produce more energy than the fusion reaction needed to ignite, but it wasn’t anywhere close to what a power plant would need to generate. Fission splits heavy atoms like uranium to produce power, and we’ve been doing that since the 1950s.

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Despite decades of experience, building fission reactors cost-effectively remains a significant challenge. Fission startups building small modular reactors (SMR) are counting on mass manufacturing to help bring costs down, though that theory has yet to be proven. Benefits from scaling production can take around a decade to materialize.

Johal said that Zap expects to start generating revenue from the new fission business within a year. “Our business model is not dependent upon generating electrons,” she said. Revenue could come from federal programs from the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy, but it could also include “milestone payments” and reserved production capacity from companies that need massive amounts of electricity, she said.

Milestone payments could be an intriguing model for Zap and other energy startups to follow.

It’s similar in concept to how ASML extracted money from Intel, TSMC, and Samsung to develop extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV). The semiconductor manufacturers effectively paid a premium for ASML shares, underwriting R&D in the technology and reserving capacity once EUV machines entered production.

But there’s a fundamental difference between what Zap is attempting and what ASML pulled off. When ASML ginned up its “Customer Co-Investment Program for Innovation,” it was clear the Dutch company was the only show in town — everyone else had given up on EUV. In the energy world, tech companies have a range of different technologies and suppliers to pick from. They’ll want to see something extra special in Zap’s fission proposal before they pony up.

On that front, potential buyers can already start assessing Zap’s plans. The startup’s fission reactor will be based on the 4S, a molten salt-cooled design that was jointly developed by Toshiba and Japan’s power industry research institute. Ultimately, it was never built, but Johal said the design comes with “no intellectual property entanglement.”

Johal expects there will be enough demand in the 2030s that Zap will find plenty of customers, despite being years behind other fission startups. “There will not be enough reactors in the near term,” she said.

Follow the money

For Zap’s fission gambit to pay off,

Fusion power startup Zap Energy pulls a partial pivot, adding nuclear fission to the mix

The biggest U.S. power grid is under strain from AI — and no one is happy

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The biggest U.S. power grid is under strain from AI — and no one is happy

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Moment Energy raises $40M to meet infinite demand for power with EV batteries