Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates Announces A New $1 Billion Clean Energy Fund (fortune.com)
And "he's got several billionaire pals on board." An anonymous reader quotes Fortune:
Nearly two dozen of the world's most successful business leaders, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists will invest up to $1 billion in a fund led by Microsoft-co-founder Bill Gates that aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to almost zero by financing emerging clean energy technology. The Breakthrough Energy Ventures Fund includes John Doerr, chairman of venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Alibaba founder Jack Ma, Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla, former energy hedge fund manager John Arnold, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, and SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner...
The new fund, which will have a 20-year lifespan, is designed to be both broad and scientific -- two seemingly contradictory focuses -- in its investment approach. The fund will not be confined to a specific segment of the investment pipeline, which means it will put money into startups at the earliest of stages all the way to companies that have reached commercialization.
Gates said Sunday that "Our goal is to build companies that will help deliver the next generation of reliable, affordable, and emissions-free energy to the world."
The new fund, which will have a 20-year lifespan, is designed to be both broad and scientific -- two seemingly contradictory focuses -- in its investment approach. The fund will not be confined to a specific segment of the investment pipeline, which means it will put money into startups at the earliest of stages all the way to companies that have reached commercialization.
Gates said Sunday that "Our goal is to build companies that will help deliver the next generation of reliable, affordable, and emissions-free energy to the world."
Er?
Surely the salient differences are
- Gates isn't in government
- he didn't run for election on the basis of 'draining the swamp' of corruption
- he didn't run for election on the basis of representing individuals against globalists
Do you even know for sure that Gates is a liberal?
By the year 2050 we will still be running coal, natural gas, and oil fired power plants. Fossil fuel generation will still be greater than 50% of all electric generation.
We may be forced into electric cars, or hybrids, but they won't be replacing power generation with zero emissions technology that quickly.
Nucular from the '50's' works as good today and tomorrow as it always have. Trust me. I know. I am a nucular enginer in charged of safeney.
I can see "nucular" as being sort of witty (or at least a cheap dig at the previous POTUS), but I would hope that an "enginer in charged of safeney" could pay a little bit more attention to detail...
Er?
Surely the salient differences are
- Gates isn't in government - he didn't run for election on the basis of 'draining the swamp' of corruption - he didn't run for election on the basis of representing individuals against globalists
Do you even know for sure that Gates is a liberal?
I don't care if Gates is liberal or conservative, he seems to be sane and rational on a bunch of stuff ranging from Pandemics like Malaria to clean energy and climate change so I applaud his efforts.
Oh Trump drained a swamp allright. Then he took all the aligators that used to live in that swamp and put them in his cabinet.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Well, we can't read your mind, so how about giving us an example?
Because the most relevant example I can think of is Gates' push to eliminate Polio, of which you, myself, and everyone else are *included* in that "special" group. Literally the entire planet is included in that group.
You may be right - but it is not relevant to the story at all even if you are since the story is about this particular investment fund which is solely focused on emissions from energy generation. There is no reason we can't have zero emissions in that (much narrower) subfield of human activity.
Which is however such a massive part of total emissions that achieving their goal would likely put us back within the levels of emission that nature can absorb and adapt to with minimal impact on us.
And your mistake is to look at the economic costs in isolation while ignoring the cost in human lives. Just last month a massive avalanche killed loads of innocent people - and that one has been fairly conclusively linked to climate change. Such events will only get more common as glaciers melt.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
> if using clean energy can be made to actually be significantly cheaper and more convenient
Done and dusted then. Clean energy is already significantly cheaper than fossil energy (solar to coal difference is massive already: solar plant costs per kilowhat hour is now roughly half of what it is for fossil plants), and convenience ? It takes 5 to 7 years to bring a coal plant online, and that's assuming everything happens on schedule - 15 years in practice is not unheard off (and nuclear STARTS there).
A typical solar plant of the same capacity takes 2 years to build, and they are almost always on time, require less manpower to maintain and have fewer outages and far fewer safety concerns at every level.
And that's without even considering the hidden costs like the healthcare for all the millions of people who get respiratory illnesses when you build a coal plant in their town.
The trouble is there is ALREADY massive and heavy-handed government intervention: in favour of fossil fuels. Intervention which has proven to be politically almost impossible to be remove since the 'party of small government' and it's ilk around the world abandon all their rhetoric when it comes to defending the donors in that industry from upstart competitors who are cheaper, more reliable and cleaner. The market isn't free and doesn't operate like a free market - so your claims about what a free market would do has no relevance to any discussion about the energy market.
Now since we can't get rid of the political influence on one side, the best we can try to achieve is to gain equal or greater political influence on the OTHER side so the two can cancel each other out.
Arguably there are good reasons the market isn't free. Fossil fuel production requires massive capital investment with a very low per-unit profit margin, and any economist will tell you that is the definition of a natural monopoly. They always have local monopolies because a market CANNOT exist between them - it's mathematically impossible.
So, it's quite sound economics, when you are facing a natural monopoly industry to actually get government involved - since there is going to be a monopoly anyway, you can make it official and extract some good concessions to mitigate the worst effects of that monopoly from consumers.
The problem happens when eventually new technology arrives which changes the numbers. Fossil fuels are not natural monopolies, they can be done on smaller scales, different types can coexist and compete - the initial investment is relatively low.
Suddenly there is the possibility of a market that didn't exist for the previous 120 years. But the things done during that 120 years, are proving harder to undo than would be ideal.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
You can have energy sources that are:
1. Reliable
2. Affordable
3. Environmentally friendly...
Just like you can choose hardware that is:
1. Reliable
2. Affordable
3. High Performance
The problem here is that you can only pick two out of three...
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
You might want to look up the definition of penultimate.
I hope they throw some money towards developing LFTRs. If you have a couple of hours this Thorium Remix 2016 documentary is AMAZING.
Sure. Let's see how many recoil in horror when oil price will get back to previous 2014 levels.
That moment when you realize electricity was cheaper in 2008 before green energy programs started to really kick in, and the price has increased from 0.07kWh to 0.18kWh in less then a decade and oil prices had no impact on it. And was still almost 0.5kWh cheaper in 2014 then today.
Om, nomnomnom...
I like the idea of nuclear plants for a core source... but the beauty of solar is its innate idiot resistance. Pretty much, panels are put on assemblies, the panels are wired to inverters, inverters are wired to the grid... done. For offline panels, add a battery bank, charger, and inverter. Yes, one can add things like multi axis trackers, but there isn't much that solar panels really need, except perhaps blowing the snow off of them in winter. Upkeep costs are very minimal because there are no moving parts (assuming a fixed axis system.) Contrast this to most other energy generation methods which require periodic upkeep due to parts wearing out.
Because solar is so easy to put up almost anywhere, it becomes a "why not?" item, especially because it provides so many benefits. Almost all new RVs are being sold with 100+ watts of panels on them, just because they are a passive way to keep the batteries charged. Developments like Tesla's solar roof will only make it more common to have solar panels of some form being the status quo on buildings.
Then it hits you: Electricity was never $0.07/kWh, it's just that someone else was paying part of your bill!
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Also, at one time, Bill Gates also thought Santa Claus was real. Who cares? What's important is whether he is having a beneficial effect now, or likely will in the future.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.