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

Reducing polution can mean more money.

[jellomizer]

Energy storage technologies are about increasing efficiencies of power generation. So power companies are paying less in fuel for power that is just wasted.

Re:Reducing polution can mean more money.

[jellomizer]

Being after leaving the Paris Accord, the US still has to oblige its promises until 2020. Also being the political nature, most companies would be an absolute idiot to go in full pollution mode, only to have the rules put back in the next 3-7 years. Regulations is rarely a problem for companies, it is the change of regulations. If these companies begin a process of lowering their carbon. They will probably continue on, if the rules are not set back, then they can breath a sigh of relief if their investment doesn't meet target. But if it goes back, they don't have to start over from scratch again.