Along with the delegates from 195 nations, the recent U.N. Climate Change Conference in Paris attracted numerous entrepreneurs including Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who announced the formation of The Breakthrough Energy Coalition. According to Gates, “the world needs widely available energy that is reliable, affordable, and does not produce carbon.” He says the only way to accomplish that goal is by developing new tools to power the world.
Gates’ Coalition is a group of 27 billionaire financiers, tech titans, and corporate chiefs including Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Richard Branson of the Virgin Group and Meg Whitman of HP along with The University of California who have collectively pledged to fund flexible early-stage investments in technologies that will create a new energy mix for the globe. Their mantra: invest early, broadly, boldly, widely…and together. The group’s targets of opportunity include one with favorable implications for the industrial insulation business: energy system efficiency.