A group of powerful U.S. business leaders has called on the government to sharply increase funding of renewable energy research or risk falling far behind other nations in the race to replace fossil fuels with green technologies. The group, which includes Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, and venture capitalist John Doerr, said the government should triple spending on energy research and development to $16 billion a year and create a national energy board to oversee investment decisions in renewable energy research. Gates, speaking for the group, the American Energy Innovation Council, said it was vital that the nation reduce its dependence on fossil fuels and slash greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050. But he told the New York Times that there’s “no way… you’re going to come close to meeting an 80 percent reduction unless you have an immense breakthrough,” which he said would only come with a major boost in government funding of a variety of experimental energy technologies. The group noted the U.S. now spends less than $5 billion a year on energy research and development, compared to $80 billion a year on military R & D.
Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360
photo: World Economic Forum
4 comments
Bill Gates you hit it right on the head!
Without research we will never reach the goal of 80% Renewable by 2050!
Inovation does not just happen, we must pay the thinkers, modelers and builders to come up with the ideas and put them into practice!
In my opinion we have hardly touched some areas of research.
Tidal power has hardly been considered; the oceans are actually quite close to population centres so power distribution is not the bottleneck.
Wind power has to graduate from small ( 10 MW) vertical axis turbines at greater heights to capture more energy at the same location at less cost and greater efficiency.
Solar power at high altitudes, where the air is clean and less dense, yields more energy capture per square metre than at lower altitudes while not wasting land that can be used for better purposes. Most solar projects are presently located near population centres because of transmission problems; this aspect has room for much improvement.
India and Pakistan are examples of poor utilization of available hydro-power; there are many inovations in run-of-river and in-current turbines that can be developed into large scale operations without harming the environment or effecting the normal flow of the rivers with massive impoundments.
Geothermal power based on the “hot-dry-rock” theory is the cleanest base-load energy source with the smallest footprint in comparison to all other sources. It also has the possibility of being the lowest cost energy source. We can drill very deep holes for oil so we can use the same technology for geothermal power but there is no danger of a blowout like the BP fiasco in the gulf! The heat extracted from the magma is continuously being renewed by a process that includes natural radioactive within the depths of the earth and the friction caused by warping of the earth by the gravitational effect of the moon and the sun; there is no danger of ever exhausting geothermal energy because it is continuously being renewed and released by normal radiation into the atmosphere.
I congratualate General Electric and their partners; their recent call for ideas is a great start!! They are putting their profits to the best use possible!!
Paul V. Preminger
My latest comment that I submitted a few minutes ago did not print as it was written; the following changes are correct:
Wind power has to graduate from small ( 10 MW) vertical axis wind turbines….
radioactive should read radioactivity…..
Paul V. Preminger
Something is wrong with the comment system, it did not reproduce my comments correctly again!!
Paul V. Preminger
Please read as follows:
Wind power has to graduate from small horizontal axis wind turbines to much larger vertical axis wind turbines at greater heights……
Paul V. Preminger
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