Various successful entrepreneurs, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, have signed up to support the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, an initiative launched as COP21 climate talks begin in Paris.
The Whitehouse announced the launch of Mission Innovation, an initiative to “reinvigorate and accelerate clean energy innovation” on Sunday. The Breakthrough Energy Coalition is intended as a private sector companion to Mission Innovation. Along with Bill Gates, who since retiring from tech has done philanthropic work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, other participants include Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his partner Dr Priscilla Chan, Ratan Tata of India’s Tata heavy industry group, noted fund manager George Soros, Jack Ma of Chinese home shopping site Alibaba, billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson, founder and CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos, chief of Japanese mobile telecoms company and solar developer Softbank Masayoshi Son and Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a Saudi royal and philanthropist.
Breakthrough Energy Coalition said that while government support is vital to ensure that the development of renewables is mandated and carried out, “current governmental funding levels for clean energy are simply insufficient to meet the challenges before us”.
However, Breakthrough Energy Coalition’s approach has already drawn criticism on twitter from solar industry veteran and clean tech entrepreneur and financier Jigar Shah. Shah has said before that in his view, focus on R&D is less of a priority than the scaled deployment of technologies that are already market-ready such as PV. Once again he said that spending on R&D was not as fruitful an investment as spending on deployment. Shah jumped on a tweet by founder and chief science officer of compressed air energy storage startup Lightsail, Danielle Fong.
Other commentators early to react on Twitter including US entrepreneur Marc Andreessen said that while hundreds of billions are spent on subsidising fossil fuels worldwide, either through costs for externalities that are not factored in to common calculations of spending such as clean up for oil spills, tax exemptions or direct subsidies, innovation spending in clean energy would be dwarfed in its impact by comparison.
Source: PVtech