The winning group will be responsible for the engineering and manufacture of 10 large superconducting coils for the reactor, which represents the “technological heart” of the project. The contract is worth €156 million.

The consortium led by Iberdrola Ingeniería y Construcción, together with the Spanish company Elytt Energy and Italy’s ASG Superconductors, has won a €156 million contract to manufacture the toroidal field coils for the international fusion energy project ITER.

The contract signing took place on Monday in Barcelona, at the headquarters of Fusion for Energy (F4E), the EU organization created to promote Europe’s role in the development of fusion energy. F4E manages the European contribution to ITER, which will be located in Cadarache, France.

The winning group will be responsible for the engineering and manufacture of 10 large superconducting coils, which generate the magnetic field that keeps the plasma confined inside the reactor chamber. The work is expected to take seven years. This project, given the technologies involved and the size of each coil (over 100 tons) represents one of the biggest technological challenges ever faced by European industry.

Iberdrola Ingeniería will be responsible for managing the project, including both supervising the engineering work and quality control of the products. Elytt Energy and ASG will, respectively, be in charge of determining the manufacturing processes for the coils and their later construction.

ITER is the world’s biggest project to develop fusion as a source of virtually unlimited, safe energy that is environmentally sustainable. It is also one of the largest scientific projects in history.