Bill Gates Announces Plans for Clean Tech Research Initiative

The key big names-and pocketbooks-are owned by Bill Gates (U.S., Microsoft), Richard Branson (U.K., Virgin Group), Jack Ma (China, Alibaba), Jeff Bezos (U.S., Amazon), Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan (U.S., Facebook), Marc Benioff (U.S., Salesforce), and Meg Whitman (U.S., Hewlett-Packard Enterprise).

More than a dozen governments have also committed to double their spending on carbon-free energy development over the next five years in a complementary effort dubbed “Mission Innovation”.

“I am optimistic that we can invent the tools we need to generate clean, affordable, reliable energy that will help the poorest improve their lives and also stop climate change”.

Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and philanthropist, will launch the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a group of 28 private investors who hail from Silicon Valley to South Africa, that will invest billions of dollars in “patient, flexible risk capital” to bring riskier new technologies to market.

Twenty countries, all of them major economies, have launched Mission Innovation, a landmark commitment to dramatically accelerate public and private global clean energy innovation, including doubling their current investments in the sector.

Global Investment to provide clean energy has increased to $270 billion in previous year, and the new alliance will make sure funds are invested in the most strategic manner in renewable technologies like solar, the wind, hydro and biofuel. But given the scale of the challenge, we need to be exploring different paths and that means we also need to invent new approaches. “That was true of the digital revolution where government contracts led to the internet”, said Gates.

According to government data, the US spent about $5 billion on energy R&D in 2013, compared to $31 billion on health care research and almost $70 billion on defense research. But the fund represents billions in money to seed promising ideas in large-scale clean energy production.

He, however, warned potential investors that new energy technologies take longer than IT or biotech to launch.

“It would help millions more people escape poverty and become more self-sufficient”, Gates wrote.