Black-Start Considerations
If everything goes dark, the campus must restart from nothing; a fusion burner cannot self-start, so black-start relies on the battery and grid to bring it back.
Restarting from zero
Black-start is the ability to restore power after a total outage without an external source. Large thermal plants and fusion machines cannot black-start themselves — they need auxiliary power to energize magnets, pumps, heating, and controls before they can produce power. Planning for this is part of an honest reliability design.
For MetroVolt the burner is explicitly not a black-start source. Bringing it up requires energizing its high-field plug magnets, cryogenics, vacuum, and heating systems, all of which need power first. So the battery and the grid provide the auxiliary power that restarts the burner, not the other way around.
This ordering reinforces why the grid tie and storage are essential rather than optional. In the rare event that both the burner and the grid are down, the battery must sustain critical loads and campus auxiliaries long enough for the grid to return or for a controlled restart. A campus that assumed the burner could bootstrap itself would be planning on a physical impossibility.
Black-start planning is therefore a candid part of the design: the burner is a firm base once running, but it depends on the other layers to be brought back from a full outage, which is one more reason it is never framed as a self-sufficient sole source.
- Black-start = restore power from total outage
- Fusion machines cannot self-start; they need aux power first
- Battery and grid restart the burner, not vice versa
- Reinforces that the burner is never a sole source