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:There are many roads to lowering emissions

[LordWabbit2]

There will be some warming, but not enough to cause any alarm.

Unless we reach a tipping point. in which case it doesn't matter what we do, we will all be fucked. After that the best we can do (as a species) is try ride out the storms, the droughts, and hope that some of us make it through the next phase, which is worse btw, another ice age. We may survive as a species (I think) but our civilization will be back in the dark ages.

There is no need to impose hardship on anyone when the solutions are more desirable on their own

For whom? Do you honestly think mega corporations like the petroleum / oil industry are just going to roll over and play dead because something better came along? I know it's just conspiracy theory talk, but how many people have "disappeared" when they showed up with a car that could run on water?
One of the major problems we have is population control, people keep fucking and breeding, I don't see the solution other to impose some hardships, like China did with their one child policy. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

I bet you are one of those people who doesn't bother to recycle because "They will do it afterwards, why must I bother!". Sadly you are wrong, they don't, it goes into a landfill and gets buried. Even places that do recycling and fetch your nicely separated recyclables don't bother trying to recycle it if you haven't cleaned it properly first. They simply chuck it into the landfill.

Re:Reducing polution can mean more money.

[datavirtue]

False. They mandated the closed system. Did the same thing with cars. Crank case is ventilated into the intake thereby increasing the destruction (wear) of the engine on a logarithmic scale. Funny, you would think preserving the same automobile longer would cut down on the environmental impact. However, the automotive industry happily obliged--wonder why?

You ever seen a Chrysler minivan dying from it's own crank case gases? I have seen plenty. What was once a clean burning engine of impeccable efficiency is render into a shitty, sooty, gas hog the more it gets used after a certain age. At the ten year mark this makes the car run hotter, less fuel MPG, clogging the catalytic converter. All you have to is route the pcv valve to the atmosphere and plug the pcv inlet on the intake (throttle body) to solve this issue.

The EPA has no value. Negative value.