Europe has changed its energy foundation three times in a century, and each change followed a crisis rather than a plan. Coal gave way to oil in the 1960s because oil was cheap and abundant. Oil gave way to nuclear and gas in the 1980s because the 1973 embargo made dependence intolerable. Gas from Russia sustained the model until February 2022, when the assumption underneath it collapsed in a week.

The continent is now attempting its fourth transition, and this one differs from its predecessors in a way that will determine whether it succeeds: the previous shifts moved Europe from one imported fuel to another. This one attempts to move it to electricity generated at home.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced on Thursday that it had raised another billion dollars, and the significant detail is not the amount. It is who wrote the cheques. Pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, infrastructure investors and industrial corporate partners have entered a business that has yet to produce a single kilowatt-hour, and those institutions do not make speculative bets. They price cash flows.

Chief executive Bob Mumgaard identified the shift himself, describing the round as a new class of capital and saying the company was excited to add new classes of investors. Commonwealth declined to name them or disclose the valuation.

Europe spent the winter of 2022 in visible emergency, with gas at unprecedented levels, governments capping bills and factories going dark, and it responded with the fastest infrastructure buildout in the continent’s postwar history. When the Iran war closed the Strait of Hormuz this February and removed a fifth of global LNG supply, that investment held. Prices rose, storage lagged, but nothing broke.

The lesson Europe has drawn from this is that it has solved its energy security problem. The lesson it has not drawn is that the thing now destroying its industrial base is not disruption at all. It is the price level that persists after the disruption is survived.