Breakthrough Energy Coalition to Invest in Zero-Carbon Energy Technologies

Members include Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce; Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos; Richard Branson, founder of Virgin; Jonn Doerr, a general partner at VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Bill Gates; LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman; Jack Ma, executive chairman of Alibaba, Neil Shen, founding managing partner of Sequoia Capital; George Soros; Mark Zuckerberg, and more.

That will happen on Monday, when Bill Gates is expected to announce a multi-billion initiative to back clean energy, the largest ever, according to ClimateWire.

Gates’ plan includes the nations of Australia, Brazil, Canada, England, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, among others.

He said accelerating government funding for clean energy research and development is crucial to attracting private investment to the field.

The Breakthrough Energy Coalition, an independent initiative launched simultaneously with Mission Innovation and spearheaded by Bill Gates, is a global group of private investors that will take the risks that allow the early stage energy companies that emerge from the research programs of Mission Innovation countries to come out of the lab and into the marketplace. No funding totals have been disclosed.

Mr. Gates during the scheduled climate summit will join over 100 world leaders, including US President Barack Obama, in Paris on Monday to start the talks. He however also says that the current rate of progress towards a sustainable energy system is “too slow”.

The fund will be fed by a group that spans more than two dozen public and private entities – including national governments, billionaire philanthropists, investment fund managers and tech CEOs.

That will bring the total clean energy research amount by the twenty participating countries to approximately $20 billion in the coming five years. The announcement comes on day one of the United Nations climate change talks in Paris. We already invest in renewable and clean energy for our Facebook facilities today, but we believe that building a positive future for the next generation also means investing in long term projects that companies and governments don’t fund’.

The founders of Facebook and Microsoft are teaming up to solve climate change. In a blog post in July, Gates wrote: “If we create the right environment for innovation, we can accelerate the pace of progress, develop and deploy new solutions, and eventually provide everyone with reliable, affordable energy that is carbon free”.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi will also attend the Mission Innovation.

The fund will support a wide range of technologies, Gates said – “biofuels, carbon capture, high wind, fission, fusion – we’re unbiased but it has to be clean and possible to scale up cheaply”.