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perhaps the Breakthrough Billionaires Club will yet come to the realization that from a clean energy generation perspective we have already broken through. The innovations needed are not in abstract research but into deployment; and into enabling technologies led by low cost electricity storage and conversion into fuels.

The Breakthrough Energy Coalition must tear itself away from the fascination of tinkering in a laboratory and instead do something real, practical and hands-on with their money. However, the group’s assertion that “the foundation of this program must be large funding commitments for basic and applied research”, does not provide much reason for optimism.

A tennis coach I used to know would tell his team after a loss that “breakdowns come before breakthroughs.” We’ve caused the climate breakdown and we’ve made the energy breakthroughs. Now we just need to start winning

Is Gates’s ‘Breakthrough Energy Coalition’ a nuclear  spearhead?  Ecologist,   6th December 2015  Last week a new billionaires club strode into COP21 in Paris promising big money for ‘clean energy’: the Breakthrough Energy Coalition. But most of its members are nuclear obsessives, writes Linda Pentz Gunter, from Bill Gates to Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson. And what the the world needs is not ‘patient investment’ into nuclear research, but impatient investment into renewables deployment.

The first question that crossed my mind when reading about the latest Bill Gates investment venture was “is this a cover to divert yet more money into nuclear energy?”

Gates unveiled hisBreakthrough Energy Coalition at the start of the COP21 climate talks in Paris with much fanfare but few details, including the size of the financial commitment.

My suspicions were triggered not only by Gates’ already public commitment to nuclear energy research, but by the name selected for this collection of 28 of the world’s richest people (mainly men).

The Breakthrough Institute, after all, is the name of the pseudo-green nuclear energy front group whose people promoted and starred in the 2013 nuclear power propaganda film, Pandora’s Promise. But so far the Breakthrough Institute is lying low on the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, although I suspect not for long.

At first glance, the mission of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, whose collective wealth is $350 billion, sounds reasonable enough, even if it takes a while to get ones head around that kind of disposable income.

Madness in the method

“The world needs widely available energy that is reliable, affordable and does not produce carbon”, the group states. The investors aim to provide “early-stage capital for technologies that offer promise in bringing affordable clean energy to billions of people, especially in the developing world.” All quite noble. But the madness is in the method.

“The only way to accomplish that goal is by developing new tools to power the world”, the website states. “That innovation will result from a dramatically scaled up public research pipeline linked to truly patient, flexible investments committed to developing the technologies that will create a new energy mix.”

Salesforce.com founder, Marc Benioff, a Coalition member, opined in a Washington Postarticle by Joby Warrick that: “We’re facing the rising danger of climate change, and it has become clear to me that the solution will require significant innovation.”

More research? More innovation? Why? The chump change of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition members could, on a massive scale, deploy wind, solar and geothermal energy, technologies that are not waiting to be invented. They are ready now and lack only the political willpower to implement. And it’s deployment we so desperately need.

Why throw more money into ‘patient’ research? Surely they understand we no longer have the luxury of time? So who are these guys and what are they really up to? A review of Coalition members yields a mixed bag full of red flags proudly flying the radiation symbol……..

The real breakthrough we need: renewables deployment

Others in the group have less obvious connections with energy or climate change and there is one clear nuclear opponent in Japan’s Masayoshi Son, founder, chairman and CeO of SoftBank Group Corp., whose epiphany after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster prompted him to become an outspoken critic of nuclear power and an advocate for renewable energy.

Some also appear to share interests in renewable energy. And a paper by Bill Gates setting out research priorities lists ‘solar paint’, ‘solar chemical’ and flow batteries, with no mention of nuclear power.

So perhaps the Breakthrough Billionaires Club will yet come to the realization that from a clean energy generation perspective we have already broken through. The innovations needed are not in abstract research but into deployment; and into enabling technologies led by low cost electricity storage and conversion into fuels.

The Breakthrough Energy Coalition must tear itself away from the fascination of tinkering in a laboratory and instead do something real, practical and hands-on with their money. However, the group’s assertion that “the foundation of this program must be large funding commitments for basic and applied research”, does not provide much reason for optimism.

A tennis coach I used to know would tell his team after a loss that “breakdowns come before breakthroughs.” We’ve caused the climate breakdown and we’ve made the energy breakthroughs. Now we just need to start winning.

The Breakthrough Energy Coalition could and should be on that team. http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2986571/is_gatess_breakthrough_energy_coalition_a_nuclear_spearhead.html