Mr Gates was a rare civilian sharing the limelight alongside presidents and prime ministers at the opening session of Paris climate talks on Monday.
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Mr Gates is also one of 28 leading investors who have launched the Breakthrough Energy Coalition to allow companies to get innovation out of the lab and into the marketplace.
Gates has been advocating doubling the investment in clean energy initiatives in order to provide access to growing energy needs as well as to reduce carbon emissions. This apart, the top industrialists will help the governments from across the globe to focus on clean energy growth through cutting-edge innovation. And that’s why the science is so exciting now.
“Private companies will ultimately develop these energy breakthroughs, but their work will rely on the kind of basic research that only governments can fund”, Gates said in a statement.
Among the members of the coalition are Virgin Air founder Sir Richard Branson, Alibaba founder Jack Ma, Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos and Softbank CEO and founder Masayoshi Son.
He said the Obama administration has led “intense diplomatic efforts” among the 20 countries involved.
The coalition was launched as part of “Mission Innovation”, an initiative of 19 governments, which will be hosted by the US President Barack Obama after inaugurating the 21st Conference of Parties summit (COP21) in Paris. Since then research funding has stagnated at around $5 billion a year.
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. It would do that by having a flexible approach to investments, making available early stage to Series A funding in various sectors such as power generation and storage, industrial use, agriculture and energy system efficiency.
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Professor Smil has written extensively about the long periods of time required for new energy technologies to take off. Oil, gas, nuclear: for all, the period from invention to widespread deployment was half a century. France, the US, India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Canada and Norway have already chose to participate in the “ambitious” project that will aim at developing clean energies, the French official said. With technology as a guideline, “the new model will be a public-private partnership between governments, research institutions and investors”, the White Home stated.
