Bill Gates Launches $1 Billion Breakthrough Energy Investment Fund
Date: Monday, December 12, 2016 @ 18:29:43 UTC
Topic: Investors


Via Forbes.com: by Kerry A. Dolan (Forbes Staff): Billionaire philanthropist and investor Bill Gates is launching a $1 billion fund, called Breakthrough Energy Ventures, to invest in new forms of clean energy. Gates has gathered a group of like-minded investors, including Silicon Valley venture capitalists John Doerr and Vinod Khosla and former hedge manager John Arnold, to join him in the fund.

In a post on his Gates Notes blog, Gates said the fund will invest in “scientific breakthroughs that have the potential to deliver cheap and reliable clean energy to the world.”

“We need affordable and reliable energy that doesn’t emit greenhouse gas to power the future—and to get it, we need a different model for investing in good ideas and moving them from the lab to the market,” Gates said in his post.


The announcement of the fund comes a year after the United Nations climate change talks in Paris, where Gates unveiled the Breakthrough Energy Coalition – a group of some 20 billionaire business leaders from around the world, plus institutional investors, who committed to investing in new forms of energy. The coalition partnered with Mission Innovation, a group of 20 countries and the European Uni0n that pledged to double their investment in clean energy research over five years. Gates calls the new Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund announced Monday the next step to the coalition formed in December 2015...

Full article: Bill Gates Launches $1 Billion Breakthrough Energy Investment Fund
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Also read the Quartz article: Bill Gates and investors worth $170 billion are launching a fund to fight climate change through energy innovation

Extracts from Quartz article
: “Anything that leads to cheap, clean, reliable energy we’re open-minded to,” says Gates, who is serving as chairman of BEV and anticipates being actively involved...

Gates had last year announced his intention to personally invest an additional $1 billion in clean energy technology....

But he adds that it’s an uncrowded investing field. “It’s such a big market that the value if you’re really providing a big portion of the world’s energy, the value of that will be super, super big.” BEV estimates the global energy market at $6 trillion, with energy demand increasing by one-third by 2040....

Gates says that the success of the effort for clean, reliable, affordable energy depends on deploying far more than the $1 billion in capital committed to the BEV fund. He plans to work personally to get strategic partners such as energy companies involved in funding and supporting the promising technology breakthroughs.



Anything that leads to cheap, clean, reliable energy we’re open-minded to", says Gates. If indeed "anything" is on the table, to avoid wasting much of that billion on "marginal" impact technologies (many with strong lobby from vested interest trying to "drag" the status-quo that keeps them in control), I would suggest Mr. Gates to start by setting up a not-for-profit organization with the only mission to to carry out independent, objective, unbiased and widely accepted scientific validation of "private research" in the field of new energy technologies -- research that the present scientific community and media would otherwise consider an unacceptable departure from the conventional thinking. I have proposed the Extreme Science Foundation (XSF) in 2008, and it may still provide some good ideas to Mr. Gates. Please see my Note (and links) here (the Breakthrough Energy Coalition announcement last year). [Vlad]



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