Breakthrough Energy

At the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference 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.[2]

In December 2016, a group of investors collectively worth US$170 billion announced more personal commitment to funding the efforts of a US$1 billion fund "focused on fighting climate change by investing in clean energy innovation." The fund is named Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund.[3]

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."[4] 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.[1]

The group is spearheaded by Bill Gates, who previously announced a personal $2 billion investment,[5] and includes:[6][7][8]

• Jeff Bezos
• Marc Benioff
• Michael Bloomberg
• Richard Branson
• Ray Dalio[9]
• Reid Hoffman
• Jack Ma
• George Soros
• Tom Steyer
• Meg Whitman
• Dani El Zain
• Mark Zuckerberg
• University of California, the sole institutional investor at launch[10]
• Nat Simons
• Mukesh Ambani[11]

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.[12]

• Blue Frontier - a startup developing new air-conditioning technologies[13]

• 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 a new carbon capture 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.[14][15][16] The Verdox, Inc. carbon capture design, created by chemical engineers T. Alan Hatton and Sahag Voskian,[17][18][19] co-won a $1 million preliminary prize along with Carbfix (co-founded by geochemist Wallace S. Broecker) from an X Prize Foundation contest funded by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.[list 1]

• Methanol fuel cells (August 2022), conversion of methanol to electricity[25]
• Data Blanket - Wildfire drone technology start-up

Some of the activities include how to connect producers and consumers of green hydrogen.[26]

• Global Apollo Programme

Bundled references

• Official website