These national commitments are coupled with a major, independent private sector initiative spearheaded by Bill Gates in which entrepreneurs, investors, and businesses will deploy billions more dollars to drive innovation from the laboratory to the marketplace. The Breakthrough group, meanwhile, will bring together 27 prominent investors, including Gates, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla, and billionaire hedge-fund manager turned clean-energy activist Tom Steyer to create a multibillion-dollar fund to bring innovative clean-energy technologies to market. “You need the innovation so that the cost of clean is lower than the coal based energy generation”.
Advertisement
The initiative is aimed at accelerating research, development and investment in new technology that will cut carbon emissions, reducing global warming.
Brian Deese, a senior White House adviser on energy and climate issues, said the initiative “should help to send a strong signal that the world is committed to helping to try to mobilize the resources necessary to ensure that countries around the world can deploy clean energy solutions in cost-effective ways”, reports The Wall Street Journal.
“Given the scale of the challenge, we need to be exploring many different paths, and that means we also need to invent new approaches”, Gates explained in a statement. “Gates’ announcement should prompt other countries to follow suit”, the source said. The coalition includes names like Mukesh Ambani, Ratan Tata, Jack Ma and Mark Zuckerberg and is expected to give a huge push to clean energy.
Gates will join Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, US President Barack Obama and French President Francois Hollande to announce the initiative on the opening day of the two-week summit, according to an agenda released recently.
Its objective is to fill the gaps in funding for these clean energy technologies and help commercialise research from public institutions, and well focus on seed and Series A rounds.
Advertisement
The Breakthrough Energy Coalition will invest in early-stage, “novel” technologies that could help “transition the world to a near zero emissions energy future”. “And it would stabilize energy prices, which will have an even bigger impact on the global economy as more people come to rely on energy in their daily lives”.
