Stone Power

Stone Power is a Hawthorne, California-based turbine manufacturing startup on a mission to rebuild America's power generation equipment supply chain. The company is designing and building 50 MW natural gas turbines from a clean sheet - the first such effort in a generation - using an AI-driven, agentic design loop that compresses what has historically been a 5-8 year development cycle into a matter of months. Rather than reinventing the underlying thermodynamic cycles (steam Rankine and Brayton), Stone Power focuses on radically improving how turbines are designed and manufactured, targeting a dramatic reduction in unit cost and lead time. Their first natural gas turbine is targeted to ship in 2027, with steam, geothermal (ORC), supercritical CO₂, and advanced nuclear cycles to follow.

Stone Power's core thesis is that the U.S. faces a structural turbine supply-chain crisis: decades of industry consolidation have hollowed out domestic manufacturing capacity precisely when demand is surging due to AI data centers, reshoring of industrial production, and widespread electrification. The company's strategy is to be selectively vertical - owning the parts of the supply chain where they can most improve unit economics, quality, and lead times - while partnering with the best external suppliers elsewhere. They describe natural gas turbines as having an "idiot index" above 60 (meaning the finished product costs more than 60x the raw material value), with Stone aiming to cut that in half. Their platform is designed to compound: approximately 80% of factory steps carry over across turbine types, meaning each new product line leverages the same design software, engineers, and manufacturing floor.

Stone Power matters enormously to the U.S. energy supply chain because it represents one of the only serious efforts to re-establish domestic, at-scale turbine manufacturing capability. With the world needing an estimated 1.5-2 terawatts of new firm power this decade and legacy OEMs (GE Vernova, Siemens Energy) facing multi-year backlogs, a new entrant capable of producing turbines "by the thousands" would be transformative. The company is staffed with veterans from GE Power, Alstom, Pratt & Whitney, Blue Origin, SpaceX, Anduril, and L.A. Turbine, combining deep turbomachinery engineering expertise with modern hardware-startup execution discipline. Designed and built in Hawthorne, CA, Stone Power positions itself explicitly as "America's Turbine Company."