For seven years, the U.S. government has been searching for an energy miracle via the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy, or ARPA–E. And yet, over the same time span, the biggest advance has been the quick deployment of various renewable energy technologies everyone knows about, accompanied by a rapid drop in cost.
But Bill Gates, co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and former founder of Microsoft, says that’s not enough to really revolutionize energy supply and significantly reduce carbon emissions.
So the world’s richest man is putting his money where his mouth is, corralling cash from his fellow billionaires as part of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, formed in 2015. Their intent is to put money into far-out energy ideas like turning air and sunshine into energy-dense fuels, using kites to harvest energy from high-altitude winds or devising a nuclear reactor that will not melt down.