The Clean Industrial Revolution has arrived
Source: Bill Gates | · GATES NOTES · | June 25, 2024
And it’s on display this week in London.
Open the newspaper, turn on the TV, or go online, and you’ll find alarming headlines about raging wildfires, devastating storms, and severe droughts. Climate change is staring us in the face, and the evidence is everywhere. What's harder to see, unless you know where to look, is growing evidence that we're making real progress in the fight against it. That's why I'm so excited to be in London this week for the Breakthrough Energy Summit. Here, this progress is on full display, and we’re bringing together global leaders, industry executives, innovators, and investors to accelerate it.
When we launched Breakthrough Energy back in 2015, the Paris Agreement had just been adopted. Nearly every country on earth committed to ambitious emissions cuts in the fight against climate change. But it was clear that meeting these goals would require unprecedented investment from the private sector to drive innovation. It would also require extraordinary collaboration across all sectors to get clean energy ideas out of the lab and into the market affordably and at scale. This work has been Breakthrough Energy's mission from day one.
At the first BE Summit in 2022, I shared updates on the cutting-edge concepts and companies we’re supporting that address the five grand challenges—manufacturing, electricity, agriculture, transportation, and buildings—behind most of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions. This year, in London, we have much more to share: a portfolio of climate technologies that aren't just theoretical or promising anymore, but proven and ready for the market today.
That's what makes this summit so momentous. In less than a decade, investment has helped turn pipe dreams into a pipeline of transformative solutions. Now, it’s time to invest so those solutions can scale up, deploy, and slash emissions in every sector of the economy.
Electricity – 29% of global emissions
Most experts agree that the world’s electricity needs will triple by 2050. And when it comes to climate change, electrification is a key part of the solution. But only if the electricity is green; otherwise, we’re just swapping one source of emissions for another. Until recently, we haven’t had good options for storing electricity at scale, which made it hard to get the most out of intermittent renewable energy sources like wind and solar. Now, Form Energy’s affordable batteries can store this energy for multiple days and make it more reliable. Their West Virginia factory, which is nearing completion, is bringing over 750 jobs to a town whose tin mill recently closed. And TS Conductor’s advanced power lines, already commercially deployed, can double the amount of transmittable power and help maximize our current grid’s efficiency.