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Gates, Zuckerberg and other billionaires launch clean energy investment initiative

Gates, Zuckerberg and other billionaires launch clean energy investment initiative Ngatamariki plant in construction, November 2012, New Zealand (source: Mighty River Power)
Alexander Richter 2 Dec 2015

A group of billionaires around Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook have founded the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, an investment initiative for clean energy set up to help transform the way we produce and consume energy today.

Reported by several news outlets and posted by Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, a group around Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and another two dozen billionaires have launched a new clean energy investment initiative.

The group, calling itself the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, is planning to invest in energy projects, which includes generation, storage, transportation and energy efficiency. Among the participating individuals – according to Yahoo – are Alibaba CEO Jack Ma, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Hewlett Packard Enterprises CEO Meg Whitman, and SAP Chairman Hasso Plattner, Vinod Khosla and hedge fund titans Ray Dalio and Julian Robertson.

In a statement on Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg said: “Solving the clean energy problem is an essential part of building a better world. We won’t be able to make meaningful progress on other challenges — like educating or connecting the world — without secure energy and a stable climate. Yet progress towards a sustainable energy system is too slow, and the current system doesn’t encourage the kind of innovation that will get us there faster.

The Breakthrough Energy Coalition will invest in ideas that have the potential to transform the way we all produce and consume energy. As leaders prepare for the UN Climate Change Conference: in Paris this week, we hope this will encourage more partners to make innovation a priority in the fight against climate change.

We already invest in renewable and clean energy for our Facebook facilities today, but we believe that building a positive future for the next generation also means investing in long term projects that companies and governments don’t fund. This is an important focus for us, and we’ll share more about it in the coming days.”

The Breakthrough Energy Coalition Facebook page can be found here.

Source: Yahoo, Zuckerberg post on Facebook