Lazarus Energy

Lazarus Energy Systems is a Hawthorne, California-based startup building modular supercritical CO2 (sCO2) power turbines designed to deliver up to 5 megawatts of electricity in a single containerized unit. Unlike legacy steam turbines - which are rooted in 19th-century technology and require years of on-site construction - Lazarus's turbines are fully assembled at the factory, shipped in standard containers, and can be deployed and operational in a matter of weeks. The sCO2 cycle offers dramatically higher thermodynamic efficiency in a package roughly one-tenth the physical size of conventional steam turbines, eliminating the need for water cooling, specialized logistics, or multi-year grid interconnection queues.

The company is directly targeting the surging power demand from AI and data center infrastructure, where traditional grid solutions are backlogged five to seven years. Lazarus offers a compelling alternative: on-site modular power generation that is fuel-agnostic - capable of running on natural gas today, and compatible with biogas, advanced nuclear, and concentrated solar in the future. This flexibility makes the technology relevant across both current and emerging energy paradigms, and the waterless cooling system eliminates a critical environmental and logistical bottleneck that plagues traditional generation - conventional steam turbines consume over 40 trillion gallons of water annually.

Lazarus Energy is significant to the US energy supply chain because it represents a new class of domestically manufactured, rapidly deployable power equipment at a time when grid capacity is severely constrained. By designing and building sCO2 turbines in Southern California, Lazarus is challenging entrenched OEMs with a product-first approach: factory-built, standardized, and scalable. Their roadmap targets a megawatt-level demonstrator in 2026, first paid customer deployment in 2027, and low-rate production of multiple units in 2028, positioning them as a critical hardware supplier for the onsite power generation market.