To Hit Climate Goals, Bill Gates and His Billionaire Friends Are Betting on Energy Storage (qz.com)

Akshat Rathi, writing for Quartz: The world needs radical new energy technologies to fight climate change. In 2016, Quartz reported that a group of billionaires -- including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Mukesh Ambani, and Richard Branson -- launched Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV) to invest at least $1 billion in creating those technologies. Now, 18 months later, Quartz can reveal the first two startups that BEV will be investing in: Form Energy and Quidnet Energy. Both companies are developing new technologies to store energy, but taking completely different approaches to achieve that goal.

The way to reach the world's climate goals is straightforward: reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions to zero within the next few decades. But the energy technologies that can help us get there tend to need lots of money and long lead times to develop. That's why many conventional investors, who are looking for quicker returns, have burned their fingers investing in clean tech. The wealthy investors of BEV want to remedy that. Their $1 billion fund is "patient capital," to be invested in only companies working on technologies capable of cutting global carbon emissions by at least 500 million metric tons annually, even if they may not provide returns on investment for up to 20 years.

Comments

Re:We'll need nuclear power

[jeff4747]

I think your post managed to get every single point wrong. That's an impressive achievement.

Storage also adds cost to energy sources that are already more expensive than nuclear power

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Natural gas, solar and wind cost about the same per kWh. Natural gas is slightly cheaper, wind and solar obviously only work part of the time.

Then comes coal, more expensive than all three.

Then comes nuclear, more expensive than coal.

We've been building windmills and solar collectors for a very long time now.

Grid-scale wind and solar are still relatively new. Most have been built in the last 10 years. That's not a "very long time now".

Now that we've started building nuclear power plants again we can expect the prices to come down

Sorry, we stopped again. Turns out pretending nuclear is cheap is not an optimal strategy. And now Westinghouse is going bankrupt.

We saw something like this happen in Australia when a coal fired plant failed unexpectedly and a battery pack designed for storing wind power picked up the slack and likely saved the nation from a widespread power outage.

Um...no. There is part of a grid in Southern Australia grid that was rather unreliable, mostly due to the limited power generation on it. The battery is designed to 1) level out the brownouts and 2) allow wind-generated power to be used more often.

A plant in this area of Australia's grid failed, and the battery supplied power until other generators came on-line. It did not "save the nation", because the grid we're talking about serves a relatively small part of the nation. Without the battery, there would have been a brownout or blackout in that small population, but the rest of the nation wouldn't have cared - their grids would have disconnected from the shitty one as had happened many times before.

Wind and solar are expensive, more expensive than nuclear.

You're wrong on this. Nuclear is twice the cost of solar and wind. Citation above. There's also the non-trivial matter of the waste stream, which is not covered in the pricing in that citation.