Bill Gates sets up “Breakthrough Energy Coalition” investment in clean energy

Though Gates’ “Breakthrough Energy Coalition” hasn’t announced how much they’ll spend, the group has a collective net worth of $350 billion.

“For energy as a whole, the incentive to invest is quite limited, because unlike digital products-where you get very rapid adoption and so, within the period that your trade secret stays secret or your patent gives you a 20-year exclusive, you can reap incredible returns-almost everything that’s been invented in energy was invented more than 20 years before it got scaled usage”, Gates told the magazine. The U.N.’s Conference on Climate Change offers some handy advice about making more climate-friendly decisions in daily life, some of which include more straightforward tactics like turning off lights when leaving a room but also some more involved behaviors like changing your diet.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi with President of France Francois Hollande and US President Barack Obama with Bill Gates during the Innovation Summit in COP 21 at Paris in France on Monday.

On the first day of the United Nations climate summit outside Paris, Gates revealed the creation of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a clean-energy investing initiative that includes entrepreneurs emblematic of disruptive leadership, from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to Alibaba Executive Chairman Jack Ma. “We won’t be able to make meaningful progress on other challenges – like educating or connecting the world – without secure energy and a stable climate”.

“Private companies will ultimately develop these energy breakthroughs, but their work will rely on the kind of basic research that only governments can fund”, Gates said in a recent interview.

Outside the arena of the UN Paris climate-change talks, meanwhile, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo both recently announced that they will cut investments in the coal industry. “We’re unbiased but it has to be clean and possible to scale up cheaply”.

“What’s now clearer than ever is that our future will be 100 percent clean energy, and that dirty fossil fuels are merely riding out their final wave”.

The Coalition is a distributed VC fund – “a network of private capital committed to building a structure that will allow informed decisions to help accelerate the change to the advanced energy future our planet needs”, says its web-site.

Our climate imperatives, coupled with the world’s need for energy and electricity, mean that we don’t have the luxury of decades to develop and deploy new technologies. Participating countries especially commend the contribution being made by a group of investors through the Breakthrough Energy Coalition.

Through the Mission Innovation initiative, 20 countries representing 80% of global clean-energy research and development (R&D) budgets are committing to double their respective R&D investments over five years.

With no one really willing to foot the bill, one answer is radical innovation that can provide plentiful amounts of green energy at affordable prices.

Current technology is not economical to store solar or wind energy. “America is home to the most innovative minds in the world, and whenever private citizens push the technological boundaries, it should be celebrated”, he said.

“The new model will be a public-private partnership between governments, research institutions, and investors”.

“Without the participant of the United States, China and India, it’s impossible to achieve the ambitious goals in terms of reducing global warming”, Gates said.

Thirty years. But don’t venture capitalists like to be around to see and enjoy the returns on their investments?