Gates energy talk at TED might spur investments

Bill Gates wishes for the world's energy issues to be solved.

Energy is probably the biggest market in the world, according to Bill Gates. And while the Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) founder and co-chair of the Seattle-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation isn’t planning to use his foundation to fund clean energy projects, he made climate change the subject of a TED talk in February.

To meet greenhouse gas emission reduction goals, it’s necessary to reduce to emissions from transportation and electrical production to near zero—getting there, he said, is going to take innovation and funding.

“We need solutions, either one or several, that have unbelievable scale and unbelievable reliability,” Gates said, adding that developing such solutions will require more funding for research and development, market incentives, entrepreneurial opportunity and a national regulatory framework.

Among five technologies he said could be integral to a low-carbon future—carbon capture and storage, nuclear, wind, solar photovoltaics and solar thermal—Gates highlighted one in particular, a form of nuclear power called a traveling-wave reactor.

The reactor technology is being developed by TerraPower, an offshoot of Bellevue, Wash.-based Intellectual Ventures, a $5 billion invention incubator founded by former Microsoft chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold. The company touts the technology as a simpler form of nuclear that uses existing stores of nuclear waste for fuel.

The timing of Gates’ talk was appropriate, and Gates throwing a spotlight on climate change could get more entrepreneurs thinking about the issue, says Anup Jacob, a partner at venture capital firm Virgin Green Fund.

However, the nuclear option, in addition to being extremely capital intensive, assumes that energy demands are going to stay the same or increase, he says, and doesn’t account for improvements in energy efficiency or changes in how much power people use.

“Behavior change is having a pretty significant impact,” he says.