Bill Gates is taking climate change head on with his newly formed Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund. Gates is leading the fund along with a network of investors worth $170 billion, including Virgin’s Richard Branson and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
BEV will donate more than $1 billion into clean energy innovation projects over the next 20 years, focusing on its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
“Anything that leads to cheap, clean, reliable energy we’re open-minded to,” Gates says.
This move by Gates comes after his commitment last year to personally invest an additional $1 billion into clean energy.
However, this move will shift Gates away from his home turf of information technology.
“People think you can just put $50 million in and wait two years and then you know what you got,” Gates says. “In this energy space, that’s not true at all.”
A driving force behind the fund is to take innovative new technologies from the lab to the marketplace. Currently, the federal government funds a huge percentage of fundamental research efforts in fields such as energy storage, which are the subsequently commercialized by private investors.
But the field of energy technology has been tricky for many private investors. According to a study by MIT researchers, venture capital firms invested over $25 billion from 2006 to 2011, of which more than half of was lost.
The establishment of BEV pairs with Gates’ Mission Innovation, which brings together 22 countries and the European Union to attempt to double clean energy investments over the next 5 years.
