Dispatchable, Firm Power: An Overview

The burner (MetroVolt) is designed to supply power on command, around the clock, independent of weather or time of day.

What firm and dispatchable mean

Firm power is capacity a grid operator can count on being there when it is called. Dispatchable power can be raised or lowered on command to follow demand. A resource can be one without the other: a run-of-river hydro plant is firm within limits but not freely dispatchable, while a battery is dispatchable but energy-limited. The burner (MetroVolt) is designed to be both, with output set by fuel and plasma control rather than by sun or wind.

The core is a D-3He tandem-mirror generator with direct energy conversion (DEC). Because charged fusion products are turned into electricity electrostatically instead of boiling water, the machine has no large thermal mass gating how fast it can change output, and no cooling-water draw gating where it can sit. Those two properties are what make the grid-and-cities case distinct from a conventional thermal plant.

Honest framing: this is a design

MetroVolt is at the design-and-simulation stage. A test burner is targeted for around 2032 and a commercial unit around 2036, after the breeder (Hyperion) is built. No hardware net-gain result exists yet. Four physics gates are open and stated plainly across these pages: plug-coil stress, plug operating regime, helium-3 supply, and availability. The firmness described here is an engineering target the design is aimed at, not a measured capability.

The rest of this category walks through what firm power means for renewables integration, baseload, near-demand siting, interconnection, black-start, and resilience, and where each of those runs into the open gates.