In a workshop in Wiscasset, Maine, a town better known for lobster rolls than turbomachinery, David Stapp has spent the better part of a decade trying to retire the steam cycle. His company, Peregrine Turbine Technologies, builds power systems that run on supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) instead of steam, a working fluid that, in theory, lets a turbine the size of a desk do the work of a much larger Rankine plant. After years of quiet engineering, Peregrine says its first sCO2 Brayton cycle turbine driven by phase-change thermal storage has started and run, a milestone the company describes as a world first [LinkedIn].
The bet is narrow and physical. Peregrine designs configurable sCO2 power blocks aimed at slot-in applications: adjacent-plant heat-to-power for nuclear sites, geothermal loops, biomass combined heat and power, and natural gas [Peregrine Turbine Technologies]. The wedge product is a 1 MWe sCO2 energy conversion system integrated with a KMW Energy biomass gasifier for combined heat and power, announced with KMW and the Our Katahdin economic development group in May 2024 [Peregrine Turbine Technologies, May 2024]. The biomass-fired demonstrator is slated to be fielded in real-world conditions in 2025 [SCO2 Symposium, 2024]. A separate collaboration with EXCEED GEO ENERGY targets sCO2 geothermal [Peregrine Turbine Technologies].
A supercritical CO2 turbine exploits the unusual density of CO2 above its critical point: the fluid behaves enough like a liquid to compress cheaply, and enough like a gas to expand through a turbine. The practical payoff is a power block that is smaller, runs hotter, and rejects heat with far less water than a steam turbine of equivalent output. That matters wherever water is scarce, footprint is constrained, or the heat source is intermittent. Thermal energy storage paired to an sCO2 Brayton loop is one of the more credible long-duration storage architectures on paper, because the round-trip math improves as turbine inlet temperatures climb. Peregrine has also announced what it calls a Long Duration Energy Storage Solution for Clean Power [Peregrine Turbine Technologies].
The addressable market the company points at is the global gas turbine business, which Peregrine sizes at roughly $65 billion across applicable segments [Peregrine Turbine Technologies]. Independent estimates are more conservative on the headline number: SkyQuest values the gas turbine market at $10.75 billion in 2024 growing to $15.43 billion by 2033 [Skyquestt], and Technavio projects $2.65 billion of incremental growth from 2024 to 2028 [Technavio]. Even on the smaller figures, capturing low single-digit share of new builds and retrofits would be a serious outcome for a company of Peregrine's size.
The team and what is on the bench
Stapp is founder, CEO, and CTO, and brings 35 years in aerospace engineering, including a stint as a mechanical engineer at GE Aircraft Engines [Peregrine Turbine Technologies] [ZoomInfo]. The company says its senior leadership collectively carries more than 250 years of experience across GE, Rolls-Royce, Pratt and Whitney, Sundstrand, and Solar Turbines [One North]. In September 2024, Rear Admiral Larry LeGree (USN, retired) joined the leadership team, a hire that signals interest in defense and federal energy customers [Peregrine Turbine Technologies, 2024]. On the financing side, CBInsights records an $880,000 round in November 2025 with the lead undisclosed [CBInsights], on top of a previously reported $1.5 million R&D loan tied to the Wiscasset facility [Wiscasset Newspaper].
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Gas turbine market, SkyQuest 2024 | 10.75 $B |
| Gas turbine market, SkyQuest 2033 | 15.43 $B |
| Peregrine TAM claim | 65 $B |
| Peregrine seed round, Nov 2025 | 0.88 $M |
What bears will say is straightforward. sCO2 has been ten years away for at least fifteen years. Echogen Power Systems, Peregrine's most direct named competitor, has been chasing waste-heat-to-power with organic and sCO2 cycles for more than a decade with limited commercial deployment. The hard problems are not the thermodynamics, which the textbooks settled long ago, but the metallurgy of high-temperature heat exchangers, the seal life of compact turbomachinery, and the willingness of utility procurement teams to accept a power block with no twenty-year service history. What bulls answer is that Peregrine is not asking utilities to swap out a combined-cycle plant. The first paying use cases are biomass CHP at a Maine gasifier and geothermal loops with a specialist partner, environments where the incumbent steam turbine is genuinely poorly suited and the buyer is already a technology adopter [Peregrine Turbine Technologies, May 2024].
Back of envelope. A 1 MWe sCO2 block running 8,000 hours a year at, say, a 28 percent efficiency advantage over the displaced steam or diesel option (estimated, vendor-typical for small CHP) would avoid roughly 1 MW x 8,000 h x 0.28 = 2,240 MWh of primary energy per unit per year. At a U.S. grid average of about 0.37 tonnes CO2 per MWh, that is on the order of 800 tonnes of CO2 per unit per year, or about the tailpipe output of 175 average U.S. passenger cars. Useful at a site, not yet useful at a country. Peregrine needs tens to hundreds of these in the field before the climate ledger notices, which is why the 2025 biomass demonstrator and any follow-on geothermal install matter more than any white paper.
What to watch over the next twelve months: whether the KMW biomass CHP demonstrator actually energizes on schedule and produces published performance data, whether the EXCEED geothermal collaboration moves from announcement to a sited project, and whether the November 2025 seed extends into a larger round with a named lead. A defense or federal pilot routed through LeGree's network would also reset the conversation.
The incumbent Peregrine has to beat is not really Echogen. It is the steam turbine itself, and specifically the small-frame steam and ORC packages that companies like Siemens Energy and Mitsubishi Power still quote into biomass and geothermal CHP projects today. Until an sCO2 block on a real site outlasts and out-earns one of those, the Wiscasset workshop is making a very interesting argument the market has not yet accepted.