Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the $1 billion cleantech fund backed by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Vinod Khosla, Jack Ma and other big name investors, has identified five promising and underfunded priority areasfor investment.
Blogging from Paris at the One Planet Summit, Gates writes the fund has brought on investors, company builders, scientists, and technologists.
Breakthrough will invest in grid-scale storage to make renewables more practical and affordable (see, “Energy storage takes shape with financing for Southern California battery installations”).
Mini-grids will be a priority, to deliver electricity in remote areas without needing to connect to a centralized grid (see, “Mini-grid developers get ready for debt capital to scale up access to clean energy”).
Gates says BEV will invest in carbon-neutral alternative building materials to green home and office construction (see, “Cities race to build plyscrapers to save forests and carbon”).
BEV will also look to tap geothermal power, the energy stored up as heat under the Earth’s sources, to drive turbines and back companies developing liquid fuels from sunlight to power airplanes, trucks and other big energy users.
