The future of natural Energy and where we should invest that money for A Healthy Planet

Photo by Maria Maltseva

The future of natural energy is an important topic for us to discuss and consider. With the world’s population continuing to climb, the need for sustainable, renewable sources of energy is increasingly important. We must identify the best solutions and invest in them so that we can ensure a safe and healthy future with access to clean energy. 

When it comes to investing in natural energy resources, there are many technological options available. Wind turbines, solar panels, and geothermal power plants – these are just some of the technologies that have been developed over recent years as viable options for producing electricity from nature’s resources. As we become more aware of our current environmental challenges, investing in new energy technology becomes a large priority – one that could be immensely beneficial if done correctly.

With climate change being one of the most pressing issues facing humanity today, it is imperative that we make informed energy investments in order to create a more sustainable future. Renewable energy is a key component of this effort and can be used to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and other non-renewable sources. There are many options for investing in renewable energy, including solar, wind, and hydroelectric power; however, identifying the best solutions for your particular needs and goals is essential to creating an effective long-term strategy. 

In the coming decades, we will be faced with a new energy crisis. We have used up all the fossil fuels that we can recover economically and environmentally. Our only hope is to invest in renewable energy. But what are the best investments? How do you get involved? Let’s take a look at some of the options that might help us solve this problem and make money while doing so!

Renewable Energy

Renewable energy is the energy that is produced from natural resources such as sunlight, wind, and rain. Renewable sources of energy have no carbon footprint or greenhouse gas emissions which can be dangerous for our environment. There are numerous advantages to using renewable sources of energy over non-renewable sources:

• It’s more affordable than traditional methods of producing electricity because it’s cheaper to produce than fossil fuels such as coal and oil.
• It has a much lower impact on the environment compared to non-renewable sources like coal which contribute to climate change.

Bill Gates

You may remember that Bill Gates is a very successful businessman who founded Microsoft and has since become an active philanthropist. He’s also been one of the key players in the renewable energy industry, investing in startups that are doing wonderful things for both people and the planet.

We need to invest in renewable energy.

You might be wondering why we need to invest in renewable energy. Well, it’s simple: fossil fuels are not a sustainable way of powering the world. They are finite resources and they will eventually run out. The only way we can avoid such an environmental disaster is by switching to renewable sources of power that have no real end date and can be used over and over again without leaving behind harmful effects on our environment as they do not emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as traditional energy sources do.

What are some benefits of investing in renewables? If you invest now, you’ll be keeping up with trends and you will also get a return on investment (ROI) from returns on your investment — which means that if someone else invests later but gets less ROI than those who invested earlier, then all things being equal this means your returns were higher than theirs were at that point in time when their ROIs were lower than yours were (and vice versa). This means that if another investor comes along later but does worse than both parties individually did before; then it also follows logically that all things being equal then both parties did better together than either one did individually before – even though only one party had more money invested!

The financial benefits of renewable energy investments can be significant. By making the switch from traditional sources to clean alternatives such as wind or solar power, you can enjoy lower electricity bills while also helping the environment by reducing carbon emissions.

Conclusion

The future is bright for renewable energy, and the sooner we invest in it, the better off we’ll be. We’ve already seen some incredible advances in technology that will help us reach this goal – like Elon Musk’s plans for a solar roofing system or Bill Gates’ dedicating $15 million toward clean energy technology. With these innovations and commitments, now’s the time to start investing!

Natural energy is a powerful and efficient way to create electricity for the future. Investing in natural energy sources now will not only help save the planet, but it will also be beneficial for our economy. With the right investments in renewable energy sources, there is no limit to what we can achieve. As we continue to progress toward a more sustainable future, it’s important to focus on using resources responsibly and making sure that our decisions make a positive impact on the environment.

We must continue to invest in the research and development of renewable sources of energy and continue to move away from fossil fuels. With a collective effort, we can create a cleaner, healthier environment while providing reliable energy sources to power our lives. Investing in natural energy now will not only benefit us in the present but also leave a lasting legacy for generations to come.

The following is a transcript and video for “Energy Investments Dialogue | Bill Gates | Global Energy Forum”

Arun Majumdar

First of all, Bill since you need no introduction I still am going to introduce you and I’m gonna introduce you as a Stanford dad. 

Welcome. 

So let me first say my first encounter with you was when I was in few months as the first director of ARPA-E and people had arranged a meeting with you in your office and I went out there and you were a few minutes late which he walked in with a document and I realized that was my congressional testimony. And I said, shoot I’m gonna be grilled. Which you did you did grill me nicely, but then I think that you’re the only one who’s actually read my testimony. But I just want to take this opportunity for at that time I asked you that I need help from you because we were starting off ARPA-E and I had never been in Washington and I need all the help I could get and I just want to take this opportunity first thank you for your support for ARPA-E. Whenever I used to meet you you used to ask me how can we increase the budget and that was a tough question for me because I have to say that’s the President’s budget. And you did your magic on the hill. I don’t know what you did, but ARPA-E survived because of you. Thank you so much. So let me start by saying a few things you are one of the founding fathers of the computing industry. You democratized computing and you touched billions of people and for those people who you could not touch with computing you and Melinda have touched with your incredible work on global health and for which and I’ll just put it out there. I hope… I know you’re not looking for it. I hope you get a Nobel Peace Prize at some point. 

Bill Gates

Thank you 

Arun Majumdar

So given all that you’re pretty much with your work and your legacy you have touched pretty much all of humanity almost. So how did you get interested in energy?

Bill Gates

Well, how can you not be interested in energy?

I mean civilization as Vaclav Smil, who’s the best writer about energy, says actually his latest book I think it’s his 42nd is titled “Energy and Civilization” and I recommend all 42 of them, but this one if you don’t have time to catch up just read this one that it covers a lot. You know the intensification of energy use is how we’ve escaped a sort of subsistence-type existence the Industrial Revolution is about energy primarily coal at that stage. And when I put my foundation hat on and look at ok what needs to be done for African poor countries in general, but particularly Africa. The amount of electricity per person has gone down in Africa over the last 20 years and there’s no way you can build. There’s an upper bound on what you can do with an economy unless you get infrastructure including roads and electricity up to a certain level. 

So it’s a huge concern that all these developmental goals we have are unachievable unless you get energy available there and then you combine that with the fact that the people who are the most going to suffer from the built-in warming that is unavoidable and from the additional warming that is avoidable that we won’t avoid. Those are subsistence farmers in Africa you know they’re going from having 1 out of 12 years where their harvest fails they will get to the point where it’s 1 out of 4 years and that leads to you know severe malnutrition and starvation at a time when the population growth, soil quality, many factors are working against you.

So, I’m not just a believer in taking the nine percent of your income that Americans spend on energy and saying, 

“Ok let’s just pay a premium to feel like we’re clean people.” But rather you’ve got to solve this problem for China, India, and Africa without making energy super expensive. So that constraint makes what’s already an almost impossible problem even slightly more difficult. 

Arun Majumdar

So given your interest in this. When the Paris Agreement was going to be signed in Paris in 2015, you put together with your fellow you know high net worth individuals around the world something called a Breakthrough Energy Coalition. What was your goal… what was the long-term goal in that?

Bill Gates

Well, my general view when people come to me and say, 

“Hey the world is going to fall into a state of disaster… this is a huge problem it’s unsolvable.” 

My view is well maybe they’re underestimating the power of innovation to come along and change and improve things. And so in the ’90s you know and I was reading about Climate Change and then after 2000 where Ken Caldera, David Keith, a few people I started having them in on a regular basis to educate me and telling me what to read about Climate Change. The thing that blew my mind was that people would talk about these downstream taxes and subsidies, but there was no discussion about upstream incentives. No discussion about increasing the Energy R & D budget. The U.S. Energy R & D budget post… was reduced by Reagan. Carter had driven it up and Reagan drove it down and it stayed down. And all these climate people never talked about the research budget you know. I think it’s partly confusion about the nature of the problem you know what it means that electricity is only 25% of the problem and you need reliable electricity and the goal is not to you know take a bow because you use natural gas and you’ve got a factor of two. That’s nothing… that contributes zero. In fact, the forcing function is sooner on natural gas completing coal and natural gas right now in the next 50 years and then shutting it down. That’s a net addition, it’s just that you’re doing your math wrong because you don’t understand the way the lifetime trade-offs are done for natural gas. 

Anyway, so the idea that R & D wasn’t like the plain thing and I remember sitting with Obama. There are a bunch of us there I’d created this coalition. I was saying hey if you could only do one thing increase the R & D budget and he said,

“No, I can do the carbon tax and the R & D budget.” Well, we ended up getting nothing at all even though the R & D piece which is a long lead timepiece that is very necessary probably could have been done.

So any case part of the Paris Climate Accord I’d gone to 30 different countries and said will you come and commit to double your energy R & D budget, in fact, the only reason Modi came to the event was that he was enthused about that. We picked his name for it which was called mission innovation and you know there was this big announcement there and in fact, most of the countries that announced have followed through the U.S. is slightly off a straight doubling, but you know in total an extra 3 billion now has gone into R & D since that event which does tilt the odds slightly in the favor of the breakthroughs that we need.

Now we also need the basic research budget is only an enabling thing. You need the next step after that, but it is certainly critical and was not on the agenda.

Arun Majumdar

So a lot of people are very optimistic as you know with wind and solar the renewables cost coming down the battery costs are coming down. Do you think that’s enough or do you think?

Bill Gates

That is so disappointing… I mean really Vaslav yesterday said, okay here’s Tokyo with 27 million people you have three days of a cyclone basically every year. It’s 22 gigawatts rate over three days. You know tell me what battery solution is going to sit there and provide that power? I mean, let’s not joke around your multiple orders of magnitude you know a hundred dollars per kilowatt hour… that’s nothing that doesn’t solve the reliability problem, and remember electricity is 25 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Whenever we came up with his term “clean energy” I think it screwed up people’s minds because now they don’t understand.

 I was at this conference in New York I won’t name it and they were saying all these financial guys got on stage and said,

“Oh, we’re gonna rate companies in terms of their co2 output… we’re gonna say this company puts out a lot of co2 and financial markets are magical, and all of a sudden the co2 will stop being emitted.” And I was like, okay how do you make steel… do you do guys on Wall Street do you have something in your desks that make steel…where’s the fertilizer, cement, plastic… where’s it going to come from? You know… do planes fly through the sky because of some number you put on a spreadsheet? 

So the madness of this so-called finance is the solution I don’t get. I just don’t get that there is no substitute for how the industrial economy runs today. And you know the paradigmatic country is India. Will India pay a premium price to have materials to build buildings to get rid of slums… will they pay a premium price for air conditioning? Basically, the answer is no. The voters there won’t and they probably shouldn’t deny themselves when their greenhouse gas emissions per person are only a twentieth of what the US has already admitted and so you know who should go first and get emissions per person down to make up for what done in-house, of course, that should be us so there’s not even an argument in justice that says that price premium ways of doing all the things not just electricity that that happens. 

So the idea that we have the current tools and it’s just because these utility people are evil people and if we would just beat on them and you know put it on our rooftop. That’s more of a block than climate denial. The climate is easy to solve group is our biggest problem. 

Arun Majumdar

So what are the breakthroughs do you think we need in terms of technology?

Bill Gates

Well, it’s pretty straightforward that in the electricity sector either need something like nuclear fission or fusion that runs 24 hours with the high-duty cycle, or if you’re going to rely on intermittent sources then you need some monster miracle that’s more than an order of magnitude away from anything. There is grid storage, not consumer vehicles going 300 miles. This is you know hey Tokyo don’t worry about it. It was cheap to solve and by the way you’re only getting value out of that battery once a year. So you know do the math on what that looks like per kilowatt hour. 

Anyway, so you have electricity generation… you have the industrial economy… so you have to figure out how to make all those things. A lot of the things if you can make cheap hydrogen that actually solves several of those things in terms of the chemistry type side of that. But steel and cement are kind of special and require particular solutions. You have transport problems other than cars which the energy intensity far more difficult. 

And 24% of the emissions are agriculture and meat-related emissions and those are very difficult. I fund things like Impossible Foods… Beyond Meat… a variety of companies to try and completely change how products that the acid test is can you tell it’s artificial meat or not if you can tell we’re in big trouble.

So the goal is sometime in the next five years to have that product at least in the ground beef category be such that you cannot tell the difference and that’s pretty big. I mean cows if they were a country would be in the top five emitters in the world! That’s just cows! And people believe me they’ve tried to feed them different things or put a little torch on their butt or things… it doesn’t work. 

Arun Majumdar

But it’s also deforestation that is caused by grazing and things like that.

Bill Gates

That’s right, but the beef you know if you get to a ? per person actually you have reforestation. So Massachusetts today is more forested than it’s been in the last 60 years, but in general, you do get deforestation. So if you take Indonesia and Brazil their biggest category of emissions by far is the land use piece. If you take Australia, and New Zealand it’s the cows that are there that are the biggest. 

So you need innovation in a surprising number of sectors of the economy and unfortunately, the goal is zero. Actually, the way they do the models now because they’re trying to make it look like 1.5 degrees isn’t the biggest joke ever. They show these gigantic negative emissions you know and I’m the biggest funder of various carbon capture things, liquid, solid, you name it. But the likelihood of that being economic is more than two orders of magnitude non-economic right at the moment. And as Vaclav reminds us, it would have to be ten times the size of the oil industry which is the amount of stuff that you would have to stick underground. This is ten times the entire oil industry.

Arun Majumdar

So let’s talk about the agriculture side because I think that’s really important. I’m a product of the Green Revolution which was this short strain of wheat I would not be here if it was not for that do you think given the tools that we have in biology today of CRISPR/Cas9 and all the gene editing…Do you think there’s another Green Revolution we should have not just for food, but for carbon as well, and maybe a combination of the two and one shot you think that’s possible?

Bill Gates

Well yeah, the Gates Foundation funds a thing called improving photosynthetic efficiency and there is literally a factor of two to be had in terms of changing the basic photosynthetic pathway there are about four different things you have to do. But the photosynthetic pathway is not optimized… that if there was an evolutionary bottom like when co2 levels were very low and these plants don’t have the right Rubisco and the right… they turn off they don’t like to die and so they’re not maximizers in terms of their output. And so there are various ways that you can change photosynthesis. That would be extremely valuable not just in the plant economy, but also should be moved over into trees that are extremely good. They sequester carbon extremely well that’s a large standing stock of carbon although it’s a one-time gain unless you do some let’s put it down below the ground eventually it’ll rot and recycle back in. So yes and I think it’s like improving photosynthetic efficiency not funded you know what could be cooler than improving photosynthetic efficiency? But yes, we need a new Green Revolution agriculture productivity in Africa is a quarter of what it is in the U.S. and Europe it’s partly because you don’t have Extension Service, you don’t have fertilizer, you don’t have irrigation, but it’s also that these seeds are not well adapted to the various environmental conditions. Africa has more variety than any other continent…so the variety of types of seeds you need is actually a lot greater. It’s that whole seed thing is not well invested in, but if you care about climate adaptation the thing you would most invest in by far the top of the list would be more productive seeds. So if you’re only having three or four good years you either maintain buffer stock or you sell it and you have cash that holds you through that year that your harvest isn’t working. likewise, there’s a lot we can do to deal with high temperatures and deal with drought. There are crops like sorghum that teach us how you can deal with tough conditions.

Arun Majumdar

So switching subjects you are a big supporter of nuclear and in fact, you invested in Terrapower. My question to you is right now it is not cost-competitive in the United States. Korea has done very well in this and Terrapower is going to install I think the first thing in China. So what are your thoughts on how to make nuclear which is carbon as you said based power how do you make it competitive today? 

Bill Gates

Yes, so nuclear starts out for reactions with a million times advantage over burning hydrocarbons. So you think hey, a factor of a million that we must be able to preserve at least some of that and not be absurdly expensive. In fact, in the U.S. nuclear is not even close to being competitive it’s probably a factor of four or five non-competitive. The key parameters in a nuclear build are:

How long it takes to build?

What is the interest rate of your money?

And maybe some uncertainty factor whether you get stopped or not. And so in China, those numbers are basically three to four years and 2% whereas in the U.S. there maybe 8 to 9 years 15 percent, and maybe 50 percent chance you’ll get shut down before you get started. So when you’re competing with super cheap natural gas there’s no way. Also, current designs are although per output it’s the safest form of energy ever created more than say natural gas lines that blow up in neighborhoods, or coal mines that you know create particulate that’s not good for health. Because it happens in Chornobyl-like events it’s unfortunate. Those designs that have high pressure and they don’t have a good heat pool and they require operators to actually look at lights and do things it’s a pathetic design. And yet it hasn’t been changed it hasn’t been redone in the digital age where we can massively simplify it to make sure there’s no pressure anywhere which forces you to in our case of sodium pool design. So it’s on paper which is where it exists in this incredible simulation this thing is in phenomenal incredible an end of so-called fourth generation nuclear it’s the only well-funded project even so you know it requires the U.S. and China to work together how’s that going? It requires a lot of patient capital but nuclear in China is cheaper than coal. 

Arun Majumdar

Do you need more tariffs by the way?

Bill Gates

Well, we need comedy we need the U.S., Canada, and China to work together to bring this solution because the U.S. understanding of these issues is phenomenal. We shut down, but there was a lot of material learning there that was quite fantastic and the Chinese are where they’re going to build a lot of reactors really build them I mean this they’ll show you the sights they’re quite serious about it. So even nuclear has a chance that’s probably it.

Arun Majumdar

So you’re talking about the technological side if you can somehow bring down the cost and make it safer, but these are all playing in the energy markets and the energy markets are short-term and these are investments that are in a nuclear case 60 years maybe seven years maybe even longer in the future. So is there some innovation on the market side that will actually favor the long-term investment? Should there be some innovations out there?

Bill Gates

Well, unlike software where the customer set for a particular software product is very heterogeneous and a new entrant could in and say,

“Okay, we’ll serve the customers who want the really cheap form or the ones who want the simple one the ones with lots of features.” When it comes to pumping electrons at people there’s like one commodity market that is more than demanding about reliability and so the incentives for a utility company in going to their regulator and saying,

“Okay, we want to make electrons with this new technology.”

What possible reward do they have for taking risks that will either fall on them or fall on the ratepayers? It’s a market whose R & D percentage is the lowest of any large market. In that case, I’m not calling education a market it has the lowest R & D percentage of any part of the economy. But energy of the “market” driven areas has extremely? and it’s partly what you say is anything you do today by the time it’s used in volume that your patents will probably be expired and so it’s not like software and people have been spoiled by software. And in fact, the great venture capitalists here in the valley who supported a lot of green stuff got a lot of negative feedback because they were taking on these much tougher problems and that’s why a new sort of wave of that with incredible help from John Doerr, Vinod Khosla, people who really pioneered the area now this breakthrough energy ventures is trying to step into that space of ok we’ll fund things and you know we have a 20-year lifetime which is longer than a typical venture structure.

Arun Majumdar

You’ll put your own money behind that and you have other people putting money into breakthrough energy ventures… now that you seeing the sort of the new technologies and the entrepreneurial spirit coming out. What excites you and where are the gaps?

Bill Gates

I’m more excited than I expected to be you know I was calling up those people and saying hey let’s put a billion dollars together they were like is there good stuff out there? Oh sure, absolutely. And you know I was hoping that was true. So we hired an amazing team a high percentage are people who are fantastic. So there’s only a little over a year ago when we got the team in place and the deal flow that they’ve seen and we have a kind of ridiculous criteria which is we don’t invest in something unless if it works it will avoid a half a percent of greenhouse gas emissions. 

So we can do artificial meat, we can do new ways of making steel you know across the whole range it’s not just electricity. But we’re not going to invest in some other things so like Climate Court which the note had in his green phone thank God because that’s what made it profitable… that wouldn’t fit our criteria of what to invest in. So we are seeing a lot of great stuff. In fact, if you set aside money for the later stages of these companies that they don’t need yet it’ll only take us maybe two to three years before all that money is committed to those companies and whatever successful follow-on things we think we mean to be part of and so we’ll go back and say hey let’s do more so the deep thinking and these are you know there’s no guarantee.

The fact that you know chips actually work or sending signals through the air actually works you know it’s assuming there are great breakthroughs like that which you know only nature knows the answer to those things. But it appears that y making hydrogen cheap, making Steel cheap there at least for every crazy thing we need to solve we’re finding at least three or four people most of them will end up being wrong who are willing to say hey write us a check and we’ll go to work on that.

Arun Majumdar

Terrific any prospects of nuclear fusion?

Bill Gates

Yes, the breakthrough energy did put money into Commonwealth Fusion Systems which is sort of an MIT approach where you take the fact that you can do these extremely high Tesla magnets and so you take the design and it’s a lot smaller. Also, the problem with fusion isn’t just making it work and nobody’s ever gotten real energy break even making an economic is hard because you know in our fission work we have these neutrons and they degrade our materials and it’s the toughest thing about that the so-called traveling wave reactor design of Terrapower these fusion guys those neutrons are in a completely different league in terms. So how they replace materials over time is very difficult. And there are actually more fusion companies in North America several are Canadian today than there are fission companies. In a certain sense if you put aside SMR they’re really other than Terrapower there aren’t any really big play fusion companies. So fusion there are quite a few. Now a lot of them look sketchy to me but you know thank God. I mean having a dozen companies is very impressive that that’s going on. 

Arun Majumdar

I think we are seeing not only magnetic confinement fusion but also inertial confinement and actually, combinations of those two that are being tried out now some of them will fail, and many of them will fail, but hoping that some of them may or one of them may succeed and that’s the breakthrough. So you have assembled an amazing group of billionaires in this breakthrough Energy Coalition and you are now investing in technology, but that platform that you have is more than just technology. What else do you want to accomplish with this group of people that you assemble worldwide?

Bill Gates

Well, obviously we want to be a voice to encourage these research budgets to go up and stay up and to be spent properly. We just did a deal with the European Union where they put money into fund startups literally European Union money and it’s because they’re worried that if they raise the research money there won’t be investors coming to Europe and finding the really good work there. And so it was a sort of pretty cool quid pro quo. We never could have gotten that mission innovation R & D increase if we haven’t said that there will be a venture fund that will take the best work and carry it forward ideally all the way into a product. So being a voice of okay what are the regulatory barriers to these start-up companies… what type what types of tax credits and approaches are very helpful? 

Today it’s mostly the learning curve for solar and wind which you know… is that really compared to other technologies that have this weird thing of working 24 hours a day, you know should you really be funding the intermittent stuff with all the money and putting no money in the stuff that works all the time? So the tax policies you know you got to think of Japan or Germany and the U.S. for bootstrapping the solar panel industry which is today largely a Chinese industry. 

Arun Majumdar

You got these people from all over the world and they’re very influential you are a global citizen. Do you think we have a shot at some point at a global carbon price?

Bill Gates

Well, the globe is a big place you have a hundred ninety-four countries you know. I’m involved in eradicating polio and you know so I deal with northern Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan Afghanistan you know I know we’re in Kandahar we still have polio. So if you say global that brings up an image to me that okay you’re not gonna get every country in this thing and it is interesting that of all the tough problems stopping pandemics, solving Climate Change they are cooperation problems that no one country alone can do. I’m hopeful that you can get most of the rich countries involved in that. I think it’s a very helpful thing to send that price signal it’s not to go being in the sense that it substitutes for the damage it’s not at all it’s simply a price signal that incents some risk-taking behavior but not the classic Pigouvian, Hey pay the price, okay that’s what the burden to society was it’s not within a factor of 100 of what that is issue project out into the future. 

Certainly for things like carbon capture and sequestration because there’s not a view that will ever be positive economics you’ve got to have that and that probably is a necessary thing and you’ve got to have the sense that it’ll be there over a long period of time. 

I do think you know some things that I think will come back you know I think the U.S. will re-enter the Paris Climate Accord, but you know take Germany who’s very well-meaning. They managed to make their consumers pay the highest electricity prices in the world their net carbon reduction is less than 10%. So the world is not had a year where we make less co2 and you know that will be an interesting year if it’s not because of a massive recession. What is that year? But yes, a tax would make sense, but when you map it into India you know are you really taxing those poor people or just getting air conditioning for the first time? I want to meet that politician who figured that out.

Arun Majumdar

We started the discussion with some subsistence farmers in Africa and others and you know they are many of them as you have seen are still in the 19th century so do you think they should get the infrastructure that we have in the 20th or is there a possibility of leapfrogging and if so what would be that infrastructure…what would be the system that will empower them and get them out of poverty for the energy?

Bill Gates

One thing that really as irritating to me is when people think,

“Oh, let’s just get Africa to use clean energy?”

They are rounding their emissions. If they need to build hydro dams let them build those dams and yes the reservoir causes methane emissions it’s fairly big numbers, but Africa should not be constrained they should do whatever it takes to reduce malnutrition and starvation. And so people get confused they think,

“Oh, let’s let them have little lights at night.” Well, you don’t create any jobs because the amount of electricity required to create a job that is not intermittent electricity that is electricity that’s there all the time. So just you know cheap solar panels… which is great… that is no solution. They need grids they need rather large amounts of power. Yes, I hope that we have some breakthrough that their relative lack of installed base makes them a good candidate, but if you really say who’s going to add energy capacity in the next 25 years that’s India and China. China still has one doubling left if India is on a reasonable economic growth post they have a factor of 4 still to increase. Sub-saharan Africa is the eventual problem, but this problem should first be solved in China and India with examples from the richer countries, and then we can map it onto Africa.

So I’m not seeing many things that are like homes where they completely obviate the need for a grid for example. Now if somebody has that invention… hallelujah!

Arun Majumdar

Terrific on that hallelujah note thank you so much for being here and you have a standing room you know only out here let’s thank Bill for being here and sharing his thoughts with us.

Author: Bliss

Dedicated to making a positive difference for people, animals, and this beautiful planet!