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.
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China had showed a strong and significant desire to reduce local pollution in the past five years, he said, from reducing local pollution and carbon emissions to developing new clean energy technologies.
The coalition is taking a five-pronged approach to investment that will include filling funding gaps left by government investment and pumping resources (in the form of Series A funding, Angel investments and other support) into clean-energy companies from an array of industries.
“Affordable and reliable energy makes it easier for [the world’s poorest] to grow more food, run schools and hospitals and businesses, have refrigerators at home, and take advantage of all the things that make up modern life”, writes Gates.
Jason Blumberg, chief executive and managing director at Energy Foundry, a venture capital firm focusing on new energy and clean technologies, explains how much money is needed to find clean, high tech energy. With technology as a guideline, “the new model will be a public-private partnership between governments, research institutions and investors”, the White Home stated. Backers embody Hewlett Packard’s Meg Whitman, Fb founder Mark Zuckerberg & his spouse, Dr. Priscilla Chan, Indian industrial titans Ratan Tata & Mukesh Amabani, business magnate George Soros, & the head of Amazon, Jeff Bezos.
At the Paris Climate Summit, another initiative known as “Mission Innovation” was announced. The current US government investment portfolio spans a full range of R&D activities and includes programs at 11 agencies, with the largest investment at the Department of Energy. Gates will be joining US President Barack Obama in launching the separate group on Monday in Paris.
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“We’re unbiased, but it has to be clean and it has to have a chance of scaling up at a cost lower than today’s hydrocarbon-based energy sources”, the Microsoft co-founder said.
