Bill Gates’ Involvement in Clean Energy and the Mitigation of Climate Disruption

In his reference to my post on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a reader notes:  At the end of this century people will look back on what the Gates Foundation spent millions or even billions of dollars on and declare it was a huge waste of money and should have been spent to control greenhouse emissions.

Bill Gates has not been entirely absent from the clean energy space, but it’s clearly “not his thing.”  I’m not sure why this is, given his powerful intellect and his facility with math/science. 

He’s made very little noise in renewable energy, other than a strange and uncharacteristically dumb remark he made about PV about five years ago, in which he referred to it as a “nice hobby.”  Oops.  Fast-forward a few years and:

• We have booming companies like First Solar and Solar City, not to mention the far bigger PV manufacturers in China, who built 18.3 GW in 2013.

• The U.S. alone is installing more than a gigawatt/quarter, and steadily building.  (From Q3 2014:  The U.S. solar market continues its strong growth, installing 1,354 megawatts of solar photovoltaics in Q3 2014, up 41 percent over the same period last year.  Cumulative U.S. PV capacity now exceeds 16 gigawatts.)

• The cost/Watt of PV has fallen to the point that in many cases huge commercial electric companies can make electricity far less expensively than they can buy it.

• This whole phenomenon is in the process of overturning the business model of the electric utilities.  I have a chapter in my new book (Bullish on Renewable Energy) that includes interviews with Jigar Shah, founder of SunEdison, and Peter Fox-Penner, whom I believe to be the brightest and most insightful electrical utility analyst on the planet.

Go back to Bill Gates, his main foray into energy now is a concept in advanced nuclear called TerraPower.

I hope it works out, obviously.  We hear a great deal about “safe, clean nuclear.”  Now we want to see it.