Breakthrough Energy is the umbrella name of several organizations, founded by Bill Gates in 2015, that aim to accelerate innovation in

sustainable energy Energy is sustainable if it "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". Most definitions of sustainable energy include considerations of environmental aspects such as greenh ...

and in other technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It invests in a variety of startup companies that are attempting to commercialize new concepts such as nuclear fusion, large-capacity batteries to store

renewable energy Renewable energy is energy that is collected from renewable resources that are naturally replenished on a human timescale. It includes sources such as sunlight, wind, the movement of water, and geothermal heat. Although most renewable energy ...

, and microbe-generated

biofuels Biofuel is a fuel that is produced over a short time span from biomass, rather than by the very slow natural processes involved in the formation of fossil fuels, such as oil. According to the United States Energy Information Administration (E ...

History

At the

2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP 21 or CMP 11 was held in Paris, France, from 30 November to 12 December 2015. It was the 21st yearly session of the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the 1992 United Nations Framework Conve ...

in November 2015, Gates announced that a coalition of 28 high net-worth investors from ten countries had committed to the Breakthrough Energy initiative. A complementary initiative of Gates, Mission Innovation, was announced at the same time. In December 2016, a group of investors collectively worth announced more personal commitment to funding the efforts of a fund "focused on fighting climate change by investing in clean energy innovation." The fund is named Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund.

Strategy

At its inception, Gates explained, "The renewable technologies we have today, like wind and solar, have made a lot of progress and could be one path to a zero-carbon energy future... But given the scale of the challenge, we need to be exploring many different paths." Breakthrough Energy invests primarily in businesses where the risk of failure is high and the timeframe for return on investment is 20 years. Traditional venture capitalists look for a return on investment in five years, which may not be enough for the special challenges of the energy sector.

Members

The group is spearheaded by Bill Gates, who previously announced a personal $2 billion investment, and includes: * Jeff Bezos * Marc Benioff *

Michael Bloomberg Michael Rubens Bloomberg (born February 14, 1942) is an American businessman, politician, philanthropist, and author. He is the majority owner, co-founder and CEO of Bloomberg L.P. He was Mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013, and was a ca ...

Richard Branson Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson (born 18 July 1950) is a British billionaire, entrepreneur, and business magnate. In the 1970s he founded the Virgin Group, which today controls more than 400 companies in various fields. Branson expressed ...

* Reid Hoffman * Jack Ma * George Soros * Tom Steyer * Meg Whitman *

Mark Zuckerberg Mark Elliot Zuckerberg (; born ) is an American business magnate, internet entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is known for co-founding the social media website Facebook and its parent company Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook, Inc.), o ...

* University of California, the sole institutional investor at launch * Nat Simons *

Mukesh Ambani Mukesh Dhirubhai Ambani (born 19 April 1957) is an Indian billionaire businessman. He is the chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL), a Fortune Global 500 company and India's most valuable company by market value. Acco ...

Criticism

There has been criticism that the coalition was announced too early, before crucial details had been confirmed. At launch, a Gates Foundation spokesman confirmed that investment professionals had yet to be appointed, named investors—other than Gates—had not publicly stated their level of investment and a financial structure had not been confirmed.

Notable projects

*Blue Frontier - a startup developing new

air-conditioning Air conditioning, often abbreviated as A/C or AC, is the process of removing heat from an enclosed space to achieve a more comfortable interior environment (sometimes referred to as 'comfort cooling') and in some cases also strictly controlling ...

technologies *Verdox — carbon capture. On February 2, 2022, Breakthrough Energy agreed to join an investors syndicate providing $80 million in capital to Verdox, Inc., a startup company attempting to

scale Scale or scales may refer to: Mathematics * Scale (descriptive set theory), an object defined on a set of points * Scale (ratio), the ratio of a linear dimension of a model to the corresponding dimension of the original * Scale factor, a number ...

a new

carbon capture Carbon capture may refer to: * Carbon capture and utilization, where the captured carbon dioxide is used * Carbon sequestration, where the captured carbon dioxide is stored ** Carbon capture and storage, referring to carbon sequestration from point ...

and removal platform developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—one of five carbon capture technology investments the organization would make by the beginning of the following May. The Verdox, Inc. carbon capture design, created by chemical engineers

T. Alan Hatton T. Alan Hatton is the Ralph Landau Professor and the Director of the David H. Koch School of Chemical Engineering Practice at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As part of the MIT Energy Initiative, he co-directs the Center for Carbon Capt ...

and Sahag Voskian, co-won a $1 million preliminary prize along with Carbfix (co-founded by geochemist

Wallace S. Broecker Wallace "Wally" Smith Broecker (November 29, 1931 – February 18, 2019) was an American geochemist. He was the Newberry Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, a scientist at Columbia's Lamont–D ...

) from an X Prize Foundation contest funded by

SpaceX Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) is an American spacecraft manufacturer, launcher, and a satellite communications corporation headquartered in Hawthorne, California. It was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk with the stated goal of ...

CEO Elon Musk. *

Methanol fuel cell Direct-methanol fuel cells or DMFCs are a subcategory of proton-exchange fuel cells in which methanol is used as the fuel. Their main advantage is the ease of transport of methanol, an energy-dense yet reasonably stable liquid at all environmental ...

s (August 2022), conversion of methanol to electricity Some of the activities include how to connect producers and consumers of green hydrogen.

References

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External links

Official website
2015 in the environment 2015 in Paris Climate change finance United Nations climate change conferences Renewable energy commercialization Sustainable energy Bill Gates