First climate deals signed pledging billions towards clean energy technology
Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, has announced a multi-billion-dollar clean energy partnership today on the opening day of the United Nations climate change summit in Paris. A "Breakthrough Energy Coalition" led by Bill Gates to increase investment in renewable energy technology has been joined by 28 business including Virgin Group founder, Sir Richard Branson, Amazon boss, Jeff Bezos, and Facebook Founder, Mark Zuckerberg. Those in the coalition have vowed to contribute capital to help build on government research to commercialise low emission technology. The deal is said to be one of "the single biggest cooperative research and development partnership in history" and has added momentum to the climate negotiations. In a separate initiative, called "Mission Innovation”, a group of 20 major carbon emitting countries, including the US, UK, France, China and India, have pledged to double their renewable energy technology budgets over the next five years. Both initiatives aim to cut clean energy costs. 

Bill Gates and a group of elite private investors — including Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg, Alibaba cofounder Jack Ma, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, and Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, among others — on Monday announced the launch of Breakthrough Energy Coalition.

Gates says the new multi-billion dollar clean energy research and development initiative “will help companies get clean-energy innovation out of the lab and into the marketplace.” You can read the initiative’s principles here, but the broad focus is on bringing “widely available energy that is reliable, affordable, and does not produce carbon.”

The launch was timed to coincide with the opening day of the U.N. climate change summit in Paris today. Companies from the tech sector are increasingly joining the discussion on clean energy; Apple, for example, announced in October that its global operations are now 87 percent powered by renewables.

“Priscilla and I are joining Bill Gates in launching the Breakthrough Energy Coalition to invest in new clean energy technologies,” Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. “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.”

He added: “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 U.N. 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.”

Key areas of focus are expected to be around electricity generation and storage, transportation, industrial use, agriculture, and energy system efficiency. Ultimately, the goal is a “near zero emissions energy future.”

U.S. President Barack Obama, who is also in attendance at the Paris conference alongside representatives from nearly 200 nations, said it is an opportunity to “place a long-term framework for further emissions reductions — targets set by each nation, but transparent enough to be verified by other nations.”

Obama also said the climate change conference will be an opportunity to “stand in solidarity” with France, following the terrorist attacks in Paris earlier this month.