In a workshop in Wiscasset, Maine, 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 [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. 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: 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].
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 [Peregrine Turbine Technologies, 2024]. On the financing side, CBInsights records an $880,000 round in November 2025, 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 | $10,750M |
| Gas turbine market, SkyQuest 2033 | $15,430M |
| Peregrine TAM claim | $65,000M |
| Peregrine seed round, Nov 2025 | $880,000 |
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, 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 [Peregrine Turbine Technologies, May 2024].
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.