Bill Gates ranked clean, cheap energy as his number one wish at the TED conference recently. "We need energy miracles. The microprocessor and internet are miracles. This is a case where we have to drive and get the miracle in a short timeline."
Gates emphasized the need for an energy miracle portfolio that includes carbon capture and storage and nuclear as well as wind and solar. He also set 2050 as the deadline for reducing carbon emissions to zero and outlined a tight innovation and deployment timeline: 20 years to innovate, 20 years to deploy.
Gates has hence acknowledged that the reducing the carbon intensity of energy is the only feasible way to achieve a zero-carbon world, put in a rather simplistic equation as:
CO2 = Population x Services x Energy x Carbon
Energy efficiency too can help, but getting to zero carbon will require major innovation if we want abundant carbon-neutral energy. He sees a clear need for investment in clean technology innovation, notably asserting that current technologies are not sufficient. (This is not what Al Gore believes!)
According to Gates: "All the batteries we make now could store less than 10 minutes of all the energy [in the world...So, in fact, we need a big breakthrough here. Something that's going to be of a factor of 100 better than what we have now."
Given the climate change imperatives and time paucity, the need to scale up clean tech very fast becomes important. Not easy, especially making such clean energy cheap too! Any solutions/ideas how this can happen? Do you think we need a step-change or two to get there? Some experts believe that experience-curve effects alone won't get us to the goal cheap and fast, because they deliver diminishing returns.
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