Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has launched Breakthrough Energy Coalition at the UN climate change summit in Paris, France which is committed to increase investments in zero-carbon energy technologies.
The Breakthrough Energy Coalition is an initiative by investors including Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, Alibaba Group executive chairman Jack Ma, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg,
Reliance Industries chairman and managing director Mukesh Ambani, besides many others.
This partnership has been launched alongside an initiative called Mission Innovation, which is aimed at increasing research and development funding for early-stage clean energy innovation over the next five years.
The University of California (UC) has also joined the group led by Gates as the sole institutional investor among the 28 coalition members from 10 countries.
It has committed to invest $1bn in clean energy innovation, as well as an additional $250m to fund arly-stage ideas emerging from the UC ecosystem.
UC president Janet Napolitano said: "The University of California, with its 10 campuses and three national energy labs, is home to some of the best climate scientists in the world and as a public research institution we take the imperative to solve global climate change very seriously.
"With access to the private capital represented by investors in the Breakthrough Energy Coalition we can more effectively integrate our public research pipeline to deliver new technology and insights that will revolutionize the way the world thinks about and uses energy."
The alliance will invest across electricity generation and storage, transportation, industrial use, agriculture; and energy system efficiency to transition into future with zero-emissions energy.
The members will work on inventing technologies that will limit the impact of climate change while providing affordable and reliable energy to everyone as the existing system of basic research, clean energy investment, regulatory frameworks, and subsidies fails to sufficiently mobilize investment in transformative energy solutions for the future.
Image: Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. Photo: courtesy of DFID – UK Department for International Development / Wikipedia.