Bill Gates Talks About the Future of Energy

so thank you for being here the Gates Foundation is focused on health it's focused on development it's focused on education in the United States it's not focused on energy so why are we here well I spend a fair bit of my time on energy for a couple reasons one is that if you want to improve the situation of the poorest two billion on the planet having the price of energy go down substantially it would be about the best thing you could do for them like fertilizer is basically energy the their ability to get their inputs to come in to where they live their ability to get their produce out their ability to get to jobs and things energy is the thing that allowed civilization over the last 200 years to dramatically change everything and so if you want to reach the rest of civilization and give them lighting services refrigeration services you've got to bring the cost of energy down a lot it's final along with the carbon constraint that I believe is hugely important partly because what it does to tropical agriculture is it makes it virtually impossible if you get enough warming the temporary culture actually is about is a net beneficiary because of increased co2 concentrations and certain places where warmth is good but but tropical agriculture which is where the poorest live is a disaster and you've said we have to not just slow the growth not a shrink carbon emissions but get to zero the goal has to be zero why well you'll never get to absolutely zero but if you want if you want there not to be increased warming every year you have to get to extremely low numbers there's a enough of the carbon stays around for about 10,000 years the tailpiece because of the way equilibria to the ocean that the what we're asking civilization to do here is very very dramatic if it was just a factor of two reduction that would be very straightforward but it's not like that this is something where it's ultra different you know every year civilization puts out more co2 there's not a single year where we we put out less anyone we had the economic recession because China and India are moving ahead and so the idea to get to an 80% reduction you actually have to have a year where you get less it's kind of a mathematical thing and then you have to have years where you get a lot less and so this is very tough the likelihood of us meeting any of the thing any of the goals we've set seems very daunting so you heard the conversation between Dan Jurgen and Vinod Khosla the question was you know can we how long will it take until only fifty percent of our energy global energy needs as opposed to 80 percent today are met by fossil fuels Vinod said 25 years Dan said 40 years right you said 2050 what's your answer to that question well if these are is a numeric question that's right and so you have to look at the different sectors like power generation transport industrial use and say to yourself what is is possible other than Daniel Yergin the best writer in the energy space is Vaslav Smith and he has at least a dozen books that are worth reading but two that are pretty succinct and I highly recommend our energy myths and reality realities and energy transitions and they both our economic and numeric on the issue of how hard it is how long it is how difficult it is to change our energy system so if you take any one of these sectors let's just take electric generation the designs we know today are what we will permit and build for the next 20 years and those plants will last that the the lowest lifetime that any plant even an attic a speaker is about 30 years and so the notion that that sector and the same logic applies to the other one the notion that that sector will be fifty percent non hydrocarbon in 50 years it's possible it's not gonna so not even in 50 years no no no so you're going further out than even Dan Jurgen when you well they mean when when do you think we could get to global consumption fifty percent or the two I think the two basic views I have one is that people underestimate how hard it is to make these changes that is they look at intermittent energy sources they don't think about storage and transmission they they look at things that are deeply subsidized and they forget that they're deeply subsidized they look just at the rich world and they don't look at where all the energy increase is taking place which is in middle and low-income areas so I think the problem is way harder than many observers think I'm in on the Smeal camp on this i but I also think to counterbalance that a little bit and here I very much agree with the note that the potential for innovation not innovation in the next ten years because you got to invent during this next ten years but innovations that will start to be rolled out in the say 20 year time frame means that we can be in terms of the first derivative in terms of the rate of change we can we can be pretty dramatic and so if you took a period like 75 years if we really fund basic research at a reasonable level which the US does not other countries do not if we have policies to encourage experimentation which you know just take any one of the things nuclear carbon capture we're not doing a good job on that transmission storage if you do the right things there is a chance to meet very aggressive goals in a 75 year time talking about 75 years and beyond to get under 50 percent on your way to zero well you can get the first derivative to be such that you can get way below 50% because the power plants you build between now and say 2025 you will be in a position to start replacing those in the 2060 time frame so if you were hard corn and you could get to the point because the economics where you would actually end of life maybe a decade soon and you made sure that all new builds were zero co2 emission that is whatever the the winning technology is so I do think you can get I think people underestimate what can be done in the near term because of this installed base Mahna Mahna you can get the new plants to change 30 years from now certainly you know by 20 overestimate might be done 50 we if we do a good job in innovation we could have all the new plants and richworld be zero co2 emission but you'd still take your Dean more time before you get to 50% of that installed base so so you've said there are five miracles that we need to make this happen can you talk about those five no we we don't need five we need one of the five just one well we need some of these or combo things so if you just take go through the time yeah let's just take carbon capture if supplies of natural gas continue to expand and drilling technology understanding geology through digital techniques keep getting better all you need to do is put carbon capture on that and be willing to pay for it it's it's expensive to capture from the flu there's a bit of expense for storage you have to have the regulatory who takes long-term liability which essentially has to be government's but that hasn't done so you can imagine a future where you're just using a lot of natural gas and you're able to do the capture extremely good capture like 95% capture which means some innovation 70 80 percent capture we understand it's too expensive and that's not a high enough percentage so that miracle alone would get you a long ways because the planet has a lot of coal and a lot of natural gas the next miracle these are ores so far is nuclear energy not particularly popular right now in Japan and Germany and it never been that puppet even France the France French public is more negative towards nuclear energy than the US public so even though they're what 70 70 percent of electricity we have more nuclear plants than they do we have over 100 nuclear plants of the 400 in the world so we are the biggest in absolute nuclear electricity generator but yeah but you were personally investing in nuclear right so the plants that are out in the world today are basically generation one and two plants there's a few generation 3 plants including at the conference Westinghouse Toshiba talked about the ap1000 which is a gen 3 plant that and the Arriva EPR are the 2 gen 3 plants I think you can build a lot ap 1000s and I think partly because what the Chinese are doing that has by far the inside track a lot of those can get built so that you know Chinese have this goal of 80 gigawatts assuming there's no more accidents that that actually can be done unfortunately because their demand increases so great it only gets you up to at most say 12% best case of Chinese energy the thing I'm investing in and not because I expect to make a ton of money on it it's because it I think because it's zero co2 because the economics are so good is a fourth generation design and there are many fourth generation designs this one is very very attractive from an economic point of view I mean way cheaper than today's no can you we had Nathan Myhrvold here last year but can you explain a little bit about how this technology works okay basically it was you're just among friends here yeah absolutely the part of uranium that's fissile that is that you when you hit it with a neutron it splits in two is about 0.7% and when you break in uranium atom in two you get a million times as much energy as you do from burning a carbon molecule so you think wow this is good technology it's a million times better now you have to take that factor of a million advantage and say oh crumb that stuff that it splits into that's radioactive that's cesium's bad stop some short half-lives that means it's intensely radioactive some long half-lives that means that it's around for a long time so basically the reactors we have today are burning that point seven percent and that works fairly well there was a concept a long time ago that you would do a different type of reactor called the fast reactor that would make a bunch of another element called plutonium and then you would pull that out and then you would burn that that's called breeding and a fast reactor that is bad because assume plutonium's nuclear weapons material it's messy this the processing you have to get through is not only environmentally difficult it's extremely expensive the concept of this so-called Terra power reactor is that you in the same reactor you both burn and breed and so instead of making plutonium and then extracting it we take uranium the part that you the 99.3% that you normally don't do anything with we convert that and we burn it so it's like a candle a candle wax doesn't burn it room temperature it's the flame converts it to be a liquid and that burn so this is just like a candle our flame is taking the normal depleted uranium that 99.3% that's cheap as heck and there's a pile of it sitting in Paducah Kentucky that's enough to power the United States for hundreds and hundreds of years you're taking that and you're converting it to lutonium and then you're burning that and we have super high power densities we have you know total Fiat failsafe any reactor that a human has to do something that's a little scary what's the scale is scale important here or is it the same are the Terra power reactor the current design is about the same scale that is a typically it's somewhere around a gigawatt type design because of the surface-to-volume ratio things the first design we're doing doesn't scale down very well now we have another design that works for the smaller type for more like a hundred megawatt two hundred megawatt design but our first design which on paper really were as well and one thing to point out is that digital simulation and this applies all these energy technologies the ability to digitally simulate things is night and day different than in the past when they built say the reactor at Fukushima their ability to simulate things was very limited they wouldn't really know we take our reactor we you know we have magnitude 10 earthquakes we have volcanoes blow over we have tidal waves passing by and we look and we say whoa okay let's put some more concrete in you can understand what's going to happen digitally in a way that you never could before and so the idea of full passive safety gen3 takes us to much much much better passive safety not full passive safety jen for whoever's Gen 4 gets built will be a no human required you know no zirconium turning into hydrogen to explode type design timetable for Terra power okay this is really fast it's not you're going to be amazed by 2022 if everything goes perfectly our demo reactor will be in place and by 2028 again assuming everything continues to go perfectly it will be a design that could be replicated and built in many many many places you could build hunt at that point because you have no fuel constraint and according to me you have extremely good economics good safety no proliferation of waste then you could you could go if you could go nuts if everything goes perfectly absolute how often does everything go perfectly in nuclear oh well you know if you ignore no no come on if you ignore 1979 and 1986 and 2011 come on we've had a good century ah no seriously I mean in terms of raw figures you know coal mining natural gas more people die I mean it wasn't far from here and natural gas you know pipe blew up and incinerated people and so you know it's it's important to keep in perspective that nuclear energy in terms of a overall safety record is better than other other entrant okay so we we got two miracles down got the card capturing miracle the nuclear miracle you got three miracles to go well you can have a miracle having to do that now the rest of these energy sources are intermittent low density answer energy sources so the only really dense that you know you take a plot of land you can put a lot of energy and you can put that anywhere in the world that's hydrocarbons a nuclear those are energy factories everything else is energy farming whether it's Sun wind biofuel and so the amount of land and the place that you can do it suitably and in the case of wind and Sun the intermittency creates a huge problem because society is very dependent on reliable power power is not one of these things where you say oh the hospital can't keep your heart monitor going come back in a couple hours just you know we are addicted to super reliable power and there's a lot of weirdness about this if you bring in intermittent sources literally the price of power during the in the period wind is blowing could be as low as just a marginal cost for the natural gas for the pker and then all the price will be in the time of not wind is not blowing so reliable systems that require integration those are much different economically than just coming in and being a 5% or 10% adder particularly when you have artificial economics in terms of depletion production tax credit and very artificial in terms of you bid your wind farm in right now in many cases if you don't deliver you're not penalized this is not sounding very optimistic well okay so the next three miracles whether it's solar or biofuel or wind and biofuel includes solar chemical where you actually get away from the normal photosynthetic process Muse other other processes all of them require storage and transmission and so these are n miracles where you have to have an energy source that's extremely economic and you have to have storage you have to have transmission storage you mean batteries oh it can be hydro it can be you can lift heavy objects up to the top of the mountain and roll them back down it can be hot sodium batteries would be the most efficient wouldn't it no not necessarily if you have the right geographic features another good energy author is David McKay spelled McKay who's taken the UK it's a brilliant book that's kind of a must read because it actually explains to you why do cars use energy how could that change why house will juice energy how could that change why do planes use energy how could that change takes and adds it up and then says okay given even very optimistic assumptions here's how much energy will need and here's the choices of how we get it he has a chapter on hydro storage and yes there are places where you can do some hydro storage but did you pump water up to the top of the mountain and then a perfectly that's actually used in quite any place you have the right features that has actually good efficiency that low capital cost and good efficiency batteries today aren't in the same league now you know the nodes backing a lot of battery companies I'm directly backing a lot of battery companies batteries and compressed air are interesting in that it's possible you could get I even have a gravity storage company that I'm involved you could get numbers that are very very good and that would help a lot then then intermittent storage can come in but you have to add the cost of the batteries or the equivalent of batteries whatever the storage is to whatever your cost of your written material if ting things up to then drop down at peak power it's basically gravel on ski lifts so if you if you have a period of energy availability you take the ski lift in your pour gravel on it yeah and then if you have no energy you take the gravel that's not the top of the hill and you put it on the ski lift and it it actually it does a frequency regulation as well as as energy generation all these systems you know they're pretty simple to characterize their capital cost and there there's an efficiency level you you pass over biofuels pretty quickly Vinod was pretty excited before dinner about wood chips this will can would chips get us there does that count as a miracle what's up to the woodchucks his ability to breed woodchucks is unbelie-- how did they come up with that I don't know venture capital ah no he has a company key or that uses a proprietary catalyst to dioxin originate these sources biomass sources don't look like hybrid carbon sources they've got a lot of nitrogen oxygen in them so turning them into either energy or a liquid fuel is fairly difficult it's a and there are many many ways to do it as was said none of them yet or that economic now he's got some that are scaling up their pilot plants right now and the numbers actually look pretty good but can you do it scale big enough to turn that global energy curve basically if you're if your key interest is the price of gasoline and biofuels can come in not ethanol because that was artificial in terms of how it was subsidized but even get economic biofuels like his wood chip thing and that can take even 10 or 15 percent of the gasoline market if you combine that with some degree of electrification say ten percent which say that's modest and then efficiency he hasn't another company I love that has this really efficient motor that there's there's multiple of those but he has one of them if you combine all those things and get say a 30 to 40 percent reduction in rich country use of liquid hydrocarbons then you completely change the supply-demand economics yes you have field depletion going on but you also have innovation and drilling techniques in place so if things like that come together the idea that you'd have $100 barrel cost can probably get down to 50 or 60 if you get much below that a lot of you do get a supply a significant supply reduction at that point so in the long run because things like that I do think can get to 10% and I think all those things can happen I think the price of oil will tend to come down I think the pricing after gas for a variety of reasons will tend to go up and you know can you get me above 10% okay I'm willing to be surprised if biofuels broadly including wood chips can get to 30 or 40 percent of liquid fuel supplies all being that's you very impressed by that I think the logistics and cost make that hard but that's what venture caps all about we basically for every one of these five paths we need at least 200 crazy people who think their idea alone can solve you're not calling for node crazy no he backs crazy people okay he is he is the paymaster upgrade of PayPal some of whom we will declare sane at at some point in the future and you're saying we don't need all of these miracles not one of them a couple well we need you have got transport transport is special where either you have to have solar chemical work or it it's hard because you're your individual point sources that are putting out co2 aren't very much so if you can't convert transport to electric and convert electric to zero co2 if transport continues to be liquid fuels based because you don't have the mobile battery miracle which many people are working on and some people think can be solved some reasonable people don't think you can then you need either biofuels that are made that are carbon neutral or you need some sort of free air carbon capture so there are companies and that are also kind of crazy including one I back called carbon engineering that literally does free air capture that is the wind blows by and it has this device somebody in the room here who claims to have a card that does capture while it's driving down the road that's another possibility the scale of a car as an energy plant the percentage of capture you can do you it's extremely unlikely that economically you could do say 95 percent capture it's likely to still be a unless you've made the fuel in a carbon neutral way it's unlikely you'll you'll get full recapture do do do you put us probabilities on each of these miracles or yeah it's pretty hard I think for society's sake we need to fund basic energy research at least twice as much as we do right now that is so cool I was going to ask you what is the what needs to happen to make these things happen that government research like that would increase the probabilities and if you take the nuclear space does the u.s. have the guts or the money or the the will to actually go out and do new design demo plants probably not I mean when Terra powers getting going I went to the Secretary of Energy and I said hey how do you get this thing to be piloted in the US and you know he was very helpful you know we work with National Labs great relationship but the chance for a variety of reasons of the government funding such things the regulator approving such things in the US is very very low so that's a path that really depends on some country other than the u.s. to do it to build the demo plan a lot of the ideas the invention come from a tradition of fast reactor work here in the United States that's that's really brilliant but it'll have to be a very international project more funding from the government what else would help speed up the transition well some of these things like carbon capture if you you either have to put on a serious carbon tax which is the most important thing to do doesn't have to kick in immediately but people have to believe that it will kick in in a meaningful way during the life of power plants so that they're their power plant decisions are changed and therefore the people who invent and supply power plants are incentive to come up with low co2 power plants that's the greatest failure in our energy policy is not to have out there you know at least in the 10 15 or timeframe carbon taxes and really expect to have and we're further from that today than we were four years ago yes that particular bill had had some serious flaws in it in terms of how the the system worked but yes the house did pass a bill amazingly hard to believe that would have taken a good a meaningful step radically in that direction whether that's likely to happen or not it's hard to say but it it is it's what should happen because it drives both conservation and innovation I want to open it up to questions in just a minute but one other question because we've spent a lot of time today before you got here talking about natural gas and the effect that natural gas has had on this whole equation in your view is it is it a good thing or is it a bad thing is it delaying change or is it helping Britain the create a bridge to change well if you put aside climate change which that's a big I do put aside its natural gas thing is phenom it's great and the upper bound on what might be out there in different layers different drilling technologies fracking technologies it's quite amazing that there may be dramatically more than the proven reserves we have right now so and and there's a lot of innovation that can take place there so that's a very good thing the price of electricity is very important and you know it appears that shale gas is available in a lot of geographies around the world in fact the estimate for China is that even though they haven't really gotten going on it is actually higher than the United States and so these are big big dumb so go for gas and stop worrying about well no because unfortunately even though natural gas has less co2 emission per unit of energy people can argue it's it's less than half as much you get some natural gas leakage in the processing ch4 is a gas is a very potent worming molecule and so any leakage in your system is a dramatic negative in terms of this overall equation of global house gases getting a half reduction doesn't help it really is not a big deal there's a recent paper from Ken called Aaron Nathan Myhrvold that actually goes through if you shifted overnight the whole system to natural gas and so the 50% reduction you know you're just going to keep warming and warming and warming and run this experiment that in natural history that's a faster warming rate than has ever been seen in the history of the planet so in that sense it's a challenge and you know when terraPower other people look at their their energy things they've got to compare themselves not to the spot price the spot price in it electronic electricity generators can't call up and get a 20-year contract at that two-fifty price they right now are being quoted things more on this the six dollar range now maybe at some point they'll be long-term contracts on it five that's what you have to look at five six dollars yeah and so you have to have an energy thing that is very economic compared to $5 now would you rather have a higher higher marginal price for energy with that there's a there's a huge number of trade-offs involved the ideal by far is tabs very cheap natural gas with a carbon tax and so even if the market price to the gas to save five dollars you're taking you know some you know say forty dollars per ton of co2 emission and the electing that and the odds of that happening in the next couple of years it depends on the IQ of the the US public and your current and your current assessment over time over time it's a numeric well over time that's worked out for us I mean seriously it's easy to get really close to the current politics but you have to say to yourself anytime you really look close to politics that's looked pretty ugly and yet the US has managed to do the right thing in a variety of issues and so you know I do think time that consensus will emerge and the actual pocket the cost of that is reduced by innovation like natural gas innovation also I'm not involved in Gen 3 nuclear but to the degree that volume manufacturing China gets component prices down gets off site building percentages up Gen 3 nuclear could surprise people I mean the Chinese build these things not that much more than coal plants there Gen 2 and over time that the gen 3 and so even that their innovation should get things down so that we can afford to to differentiate in favor of the non co2 emitting sources Kim where is christina lumpy on her route Boston powering batteries thank you and very nice to have you here at thinking about this I'm sorry Christina could you would identify yourself for everyone we met at Davos actually on the mentor program when the entrepreneurs Thank You Boston Power founder of energy storage and complexity going forward with technically complicated systems that require multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary teams at a pace that we have not seen before in the need and search of new systems how would you characterize and what advice would you give to those of us now alive like you're not alive in 75 years and active when these problems have basically resulted in wherever we're going what would you like to see and what encouragement and advice would you give to all of those who are trying to bring together complex new systems in an environment that is not likely to view data well the the IT revolution makes people in a sense over optimistic about the pace of innovation that is because things could happen at small scale because companies could fail and succeed and the ones that succeeded could get additional capital these very rapid rates you know if you made innovations either through trades or pants you could be immensely rewarded for it it created this paradigm that is way too easy compared to energy innovation I mean just take energy storage what are they going to price it at in a it it's a very strange system where the prices are basically rigged by rate Commission's and so the ability to do variation over time the pricing of reliability creates these extreme things where the intermittent people are going to hate it when you really properly price things those intermittent guys are going to look terrible until they figure out how to couple their thing with a really good storage system and this is done in you know in 50 states and a political environment you've got a hope that some of them well and it's sort of done at the ISO level - so that's confusing because that crosses state boundaries you got to hope somebody prices the value of storage properly so that innovators have a good price signal there it's very strange you know we subsidize massively the intermittent generation mostly wind and so of our spending on energy as a country today the portion that's on on Rd is about 2% the portion that's on production tax credit accelerated depreciation is over 80 percent and you know people make these weird arguments about learning core benefits of that wind isn't going to get you know five times cheaper than it is today and it's not going because it's subsidized it's not going to magically figure out how to store wind we just put it up there on the blade or something and so we're subject we're spending our money very very very foolishly if we could subsidize storage if we could clear the regulatory problems for transmission which you know that's a huge problem you compare the US and China it's night and day then you would get the the economics right but we're spending the money we're spending that's almost three hundred billion year so it's not more money it's house BAM no it's it's only more it's not enough money if you count the government explicit budget because the Department of Energy budget for research is actually very modest it's only when you count the tech tax expenditure which and the RPS price effect so when you bring in those pieces you are spending a lot of money now it's hidden from you but you're spending a lot of money are just spending it foolishly got another one Kathy Besant sure thank you I'm Kathy basanta I work for Bank of America run our global technology and operations work and also chair our environmental counsel you know I'm struck by the five miracles and I've heard you talk about some of them before sometimes I get myself lost in a sixth miracle like restoring the credibility of the banking system so maybe maybe we can talk about that at some point but but when I think about the five miracles and I have in and no doubt that there are actual technical capabilities that either today or in the future will take us to a path to to zero carbon emissions I wonder a lot about the political will because everything that you're talking about whether it's revamping the way that we provide incentives whether it's the cross jurisdictional cooperation that has to go on whether it is changing the way we incubate until there's sector profitability you know all of that requires some element of political change and I agree with you also that the that you can count on our political system on a lot of complicated issues to do the right thing but generally that happens when there's a strong will either a populist will or a national will or a business will and I'm just wondering what you think about what the source of the will is to to cause the the global or in some cases individual jurisdictional political change that has to happen well generally will comes through competition and of course countries don't go bankrupt well actually they can that's your first area but the to the degree that other countries are able to have cheaper energy than we have then that then we will look at that and over time will adapt to it there's two problems right now one is that we need to take our willingness to spend money and be smart about it the second thing is broad adoption only happens when these things are economic and it could happen these things are economic saying China when they're not economic here because we don't do site permits right we don't do transmission right we don't have the right price signals for things like storage we will look and see the Chinese do those things well which I'd say in each of those the chances are they will do way better than we we do you know they don't have elected rate electricity boards that are just looking at a short term constraint they're actually looking out at the long term needs and so you know they permit transmission lines 50 times faster than we do and you know you look at all the innovation and transmission and we don't even have super high voltage transmission here all of that is is being done in Asia and all the equipment that comes along with it I do think when the u.s. gets behind on something it it responds this is an unfortunate one because we have so much of the IQ and entrepreneurial activity it's a shame for us to get behind and so I hope we don't have to use that mechanism I hope we use just pure logic to fix some of these things and some of it can happen on a regional basis the basic Rd budget though that's one that has to happen on a federal federal basis I'm Dan Barstow from Turk an educational nonprofit and I guess I'm concerned about one of the resources that hasn't come up yet much at all in any of the discussion as we look forward to problems that we have to solve over 30 50 years it's not going to be us it's going to be the next generation and our schools are currently so focused on pouring in content knowledge that you can regurgitate on a test and not on developing the kinds of creativity and innovation that we need schools need a fundamental change I want to thank the Gates Foundation for so much that you've done to help schools change and maybe you can comment about your vision about how schools need to change to develop the kind of skills that we need well that's not a simple question the foundation and that's about 800 million a year in US education and the majority of that goes to having a feedback system for teachers where they're observed and they get feedback on what the very best teachers are doing that they're not doing and so that the average quality of teaching moves up moves up in a measurable way in doing that type of evaluation system so that it's not capricious so that it's very helpful it's a hard thing we have a bunch of pilot districts where it's going very well you actually have to be willing to fund an evaluation system to have peers come in and train those peers that cost about two percent of payroll to do so the there's a goal on evaluation to help people do as well as the very good teachers very good teachers do an amazing job and all we have to do is move slightly in that direction and we'll have a good education system and the second thing is the use of technology and education which is not a panacea but if used in the right way to extend the school day how personalized learning have feedback have the best lecturers in the world you know we think there's a lot a lot that can be done there this last question over here mr. gates my name is Mike Hart and I'm with CR energy and we haven't done a lot of discussion here today about what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been doing in Africa but we are huge fans we have a waste energy technology and it's at a small scale at a village scale and before I came here for this meeting we had a meeting with our board of advisers and our board of directors and all of our employees the Department of Defense who's our sponsor on this as well as see our railroad which is our principal owner and we decided we would like to offer as a donation to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation the use of our technology for free forever for the continent of Africa we believe very strongly in what you're doing and we think this could help tremendously with what you're doing there so we just wanted to offer that because we are so impressed with what you're doing there well I'd love to look into that the irony for poor people is they pay more for energy than anyone because if you can't have a reliable grid you're basically buying diesel fuel and using very inefficient generation technology and you know it's it's really holding back African countries even ones that are on the verge of doing well Tanzania and Nigeria Ethiopia the power sector is a particularly because of the the state wall in it it really is a huge constraint on the positive economic developments there so you know I but the foundation doesn't really do energy work right this is weaving you knew personally we do yeah energy that's for the world at large I will do on a private side if I happen to make money that all goes to the foundation any energy solution that's specifically addressed to the poor the foundation would do the foundation only has two things it does we do u.s. education and we do livelihoods for the poor and so a culture for the poorer financial service for the poor mostly health for the poor is the biggest thing we do but so if we saw way that they could have energy access which for that means light at night refrigeration vaccines they coal fertilizer gets cheaper if we saw a way to get energy to them uniquely yeah then we'd be interested dan you need to be very quick and you need to be very good because it's the last and the burden on it is so actually heavy well just high bar so bill you talked about those two hundred crazy people that are necessary you understand more as much as anybody in this planet about entrepreneurship and willpower making things does something happen what thoughts would you have from your own experience and from your understanding of entrepreneurship to apply to people many of whom are in this room about entrepreneurship in energy to make the kind of changes you're talking about well the the advances that are necessary here are very based on an understanding of Science and Engineering and so the current strength of US universities in those areas is fantastic thing and if you look at the breakthrough energy portfolios the node has the best one but there's there's there's others as well the over half the really amazing work that are those you know two hundred times five you know two hundred in each of the directions of one or two but you'll succeed the US has a huge part of that and so making it possible for them to get capital making it possible for them to scale up having a relationship with China where if they have a breakthrough the the big increase market that they are not handicapped because of you know tip for tap trade problems between the US and China we can create a framework that's very favorable for them the returns for some of those people for EndNote technology that returns the normal sort of capitalistic market works when you want to do systems that relate to power generation or storage we need to make sure the rewards are there and that is very unclear right now what what will be there if you look at particularly grid related generation type technologies I mean there's no way you know something like tariffs power there aren't a lot of nuclear start-up companies because of the time framing involvement you have to think why why don't we have more of that and you know what's holding these people back in the case of solar actually solar chemicals someone under invested in but there's a lot of good entrepreneurial spirit you know sometimes combining the US and off see overseas manufacturing which is not necessarily a bad thing so you know I would just encourage the people who work in this area that the importance of this is you know right at the top the reason I spend time on it is because I think it is so critical to the the environmental challenge and to helping the poorest you know cheap energy is like a fantastic vaccine in terms of what it does for livelihood so it's great that energy is somewhat more popular as a topic than it was say 10 years ago it it's important we need to keep that trend going we need to look at you know science and engineering skills r is the u.s. relatively continuing to decline in that because that's where these smart entrepreneurial people are coming from thank bill Gates for a great discussion

Channel: Wall Street Journal

Views: 207,746

Rating: 4.6743922 out of 5

Keywords: Bill gates, gates, energy, future, fuel, gas, natural gas, oil, environment, alternative energy, Natural Gas (Industry), fossil fuel, investing, investment, economics, economy, eco:nomics, sustainable, sustainability, green

Id: IsRlN1oDm60

Length: 47min 7sec (2827 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 25 2012