A team of technology billionaire all-stars is huddling up to create a privately run green energy fund to help steer the world away from hydrocarbons to environmentally-friendly energy sources. It’s made up of more than 25 investors from 10 countries that include governments, universities, entrepreneurs and CEO’s from around the world to combat climate change and invest in early-stage clean energy companies.
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The minister stressed the need for increased support for investments in R&D and greater collaboration between the public and private sectors.
The announcement of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition is linked to the effort announced by 20 governments, including the United States, to double their spending on new energy technology, to $20 billion, by 2020.
About Ratan Tata, Gates – co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – said, “Ratan Tata is somebody I know through his philanthropic works and I really admire him”.
There is no fund raising goal for private investors in the Gates initiative.
These investments, which are guided by a set of Principles, will catalyse broad business participation in the commercialization and deployment of clean energy technologies worldwide. That’s especially true now that oil, natural gas and coal are selling at the lowest prices in years. “Go here to view a YouTube video of Gates talking about the project”.
“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.
“We need to pursue literally dozens and dozens of paths, each of them will have huge and tough problems”, Bill Gates said Monday at COP21.
The investors want to eliminate the “valley of death” between the early promise of a new energy concept and commercializing it into a viable technology, which “neither government funding nor conventional private investment can bridge”, the group said in a statement.
“Mission Innovation will help deliver affordable, clean energy and new jobs and opportunities to people around the world for decades to come”, he said.
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Besides the USA, other countries that are part of Mission Innovation are Denmark, China, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Germany, Canada, France, UK, Australia, Indonesia, South Korea and several smaller nations.
