Bill Gates’ ‘Breakthrough Energy Coalition’ is about renewable energy research, but what is needed is renewable energy DEPLOYMENT

Can Bill Gates’ ‘Breakthrough Energy Coalition’ Become Truly Useful?, Climate Progress, BY JOE ROMM NOV 30, 2015, Led by Bill Gates, billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg have announced a new multibillion-dollar “Breakthrough Energy Coalition” at the start of a Paris climate talks. In parallel, 20 countries — including China, India, U.S., Indonesia, and Brazil — are joining “Mission Innovation,” which commits them to double their clean energy research and development funding by 2020.

The question is, however, whether the Breakthrough Energy Coalition be tweaked into something truly useful, given that:

The world needs about 100 times as much money for deployment of carbon-free energy as it does for R&D right now;
Key developing countries like India are making decisions about building coal vs. carbon-free power right now that could lock in carbon pollution for decades; and
Genuine technology breakthroughs are exceedingly rare in the energy arena and generally take decades and vast resources to deploy once they do make it to market……

The “Breakthrough Energy Coalition,” however, appears to be overly focused on breakthrough technologies and on a somewhat out-moded notion of the R&D pipeline, arguing “But in the current business environment, the risk-reward balance for early-stage investing in potentially transformative energy systems is unlikely to meet the market tests of traditional angel or VC investors –- not until the underlying economics of the energy sector shift further towards clean energy.”

Well, that obviously isn’t true in such keystone technologies as solar, wind, batteries, and LED lighting, where the underlying economics have already shifted dramatically!

I (and others) have been critical of Gates in the past for his focus on the need for new breakthrough technologies to solve the climate problem, what he calls “Energy Miracles.” Gates has generally downplayed the amazing advances we’ve had in the keystone clean technologies — and been investing in new nuclear power, geo-engineering technologies, and off-the-wall stuff.

And the Breakthrough Energy Coalition continues to tout Gates’ debunked claims about the need for “Energy Miracles,”

So while a boost in cleantech R&D funding is always welcome, what is most needed now is money for accelerated deployment and project financing of technologies that are now market-ready. ……

“In terms of dollars, the real cost is deployment. Globally, deployment costs will be in the trillions of dollars, while R&D costs might be in the tens of billions,” climate expert Ken Caldeira told meback in 2011. “We are talking about the elephant and the mouse.”…..http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/11/30/3726419/bill-gates-breakthrough-energy/