Aircraft startup Boom Supersonic announced Tuesday that it will start selling a stationary power plant version of its turbine engine, and its first customer will be data center startup Crusoe.
Crusoe will buy 29 of Boom’s 42-megawatt turbines for $1.25 billion to generate 1.21 gigawatts for data centers. Mr. Boom said he would announce details of the turbine factory next year, with first deliveries in 2027.
To commercialize the Superpower stationary turbine, Boom raised $300 million in a round led by Darsana Capital Partners with participation from Altimeter Capital, Ark Invest, Bessemer Venture Partners, Robinhood Ventures, and Y Combinator.
Proceeds from sales of the superpower unit will be used to fund continued development of the company’s Overture supersonic aircraft, Boom founder and CEO Blake Scholl told TechCrunch.
It’s an arrangement that Scholl likens to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation. The satellite internet service is reportedly profitable and helps fund the company’s rocket development.
“I’ve been on the lookout for what could become Starlink for 10 years,” he said. “I’ve said no to 1,000 things because I found them distracting. I’m saying yes to this one because I’m clearly on track.”
Boom said Superpower and its Symphony aircraft engine share 80 percent of their parts. Earlier this year, Boom’s XB-1 demonstrator was the first commercial aircraft developed by a private company to break the sound barrier.
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Crusoe pays $1,033 per kilowatt of capacity. To that end, Boom provides turbines, generators, control systems and preventive maintenance. Crusoe will need to provide everything else, including pollution control and electrical connections.
This is on the high side for this type of power plant. A typical aircraft-derived, or aviation-derived, turbine costs about $1,600 per kilowatt, which includes pollution control, engineering, construction, land acquisition, permitting, pipelines, and more.
In a typical project, turbines and pollution control account for approximately 46% of the total project cost. If you apply that percentage to the boom numbers, the total cost will likely be more than $2,000 per kilowatt. This is expensive for a simple-cycle gas turbine, and is comparable to the cost of a combined-cycle gas turbine, which is scheduled to come online in the early 2030s.
Boom’s Superpower targets 39% efficiency, similar to its competitors. Combined cycle turbines recover heat from the exhaust gas and can increase efficiency by more than 60%.
Scholl said Boom is also developing “field upgrades” to convert turbines from simple cycle to combined cycle. Operators can currently do this using their existing combined cycle kits, but additions require longer installation time. “These combined cycle plants are often construction projects,” he says.
Like other aero-derived turbine generators, the superpower will be shipped in shipping containers, and developers like Crusoe will be responsible for the electricity and gas connections as well as pollution control.
Scholl said the power plant “shouldn’t be any louder” than existing aero-derived turbines, but it won’t be completely quiet. Residents near xAI’s Colossus data center reported hearing similar-sized turbines from at least 800 meters away.
The first few stationary turbines will be manufactured at Boom’s existing facility while Boom builds a larger factory. The goal is to produce 1 gigawatt equivalent in 2028, 2 gigawatt equivalent in 2029, and 4 gigawatt equivalent in 2030. If Boom can achieve these numbers, it will significantly expand the number of turbines it can deploy.
The boom still has a few difficult years ahead. If the company can pull it off, supersonic commercial flight could become a reality sooner than Boom expected. But scaling up production is never easy, and many startups struggle to cross the valley of death that separates early-stage hardware companies from their commercial peers.
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