Bill Gates Quotes About Energy
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What are the top 20 universities in the world that do good materials research that might create carbon fibers to do jet stream kites or new magnets that will allow [energy] generation to be done up there and you just bring the electricity down. You either have to bring down rotational energy, which is hard, or you have to have the generator up there and bring down the electricity. Well, putting the generator up there is hard to do because it's too heavy.
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I've been studying how quickly we can get energy out to the poor countries - a lot of which are in Africa - and how little progress we've made there. There's no more electricity today in sub-Saharan Africa per person than there was 20 years ago.
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Anyway, the US, as in most issues, is the best, has the best capability to lead, and really needs to lead. It doesn't [mean] that other countries won't pick different tacks and emphasize different things. In aggregate, they're almost half of the energy R&D. Europe, China, Japan - it's very important that they come along and contribute to these things.
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The main thing that's missing in energy is an incentive to create things that are zero-CO2-emitting and that have the right scale and reliability characteristics.
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Energy is very primal stuff and there are a lot of leads that are promising, still at a fairly risky stage, but over the next decade some of these breakthrough approaches are going to pay out, and U.S. research and U.S. leadership on this should be part of how it gets solved.
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Hopefully, whether it's energy or child vaccines, the case of the many benefits helping countries so that they are stable, so these refugee problems that have been troubling for Europe - a little less so for the U.S. but, even so, a lot of controversy there - these things are why the future's going to be better than the past. People really do look to the United States, so we'll be there making the case.
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It's energy intensification, where we essentially have, through our light bulbs and cars, the manpower of [hundreds of] people working on our behalf, helping our food being created, helping our materials like steel and plastic and wood and paper be created. Our lifestyles are incredibly energy intense.
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There's 20 companies that I have investments in - some batteries, some solar-thermal, one big nuclear thing. We need hundreds and hundreds of companies like that, so that in a 20-year time frame we really are starting to change the energy infrastructure.
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The trouble with energy farming is that the energy isn't always where you want to use it, and it isn't always when you want to use it.
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When I say "an energy miracle," I mean that there will be some form of energy whose 24 hour cost really is competitive with hydrocarbons given, say, 20 years of learning curve. You invent it, then you look at how much its costs go down over the next 20 years, that it really beats hydrocarbons.
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The next big invention that will change the way we live should be things like ways of generating energy like electricity.
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In the same way that when the car got going, people thought it would be an electric car, people thought it would be a steam car. Actually, the dark horse in that race was internal combustion, but because of the energy density of gasoline and discovery of oil in large amounts at that point in first Pennsylvania and then Texas, it won out over those other two, to the point that those other two are actually viewed as obscure footnotes in history.
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We paired this announcement of the R&D [commitment] with the so-called Breakthrough Energy Coalition, which is 27 [major investors] saying, "Hey, we'll put significant money into [energy innovations] when they're ready to spin out probably into startup companies."
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Today, we're very dependent on cheap energy. We just take it for granted - all the things you have in the house, the way industry works.
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The US spends more on energy R&D than all other countries put together, and I personally consider it quite inadequate. In fact, I would have said we should more than double it, if I thought the absorptive capacity could scale up and if it was actually possible to get to that level.
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Energy is actually harder; it takes more time to get a product, but if you do it's a very, very big market and the constraints of doing that in a clean way are more obvious all the time.
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In 80% of the world, energy will be bought where it is economic. You have to help the rest of the world get energy at a reasonable price.
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If you want to improve the situation of the poorest two billion on the planet, having the price of energy go down substantially would be the best thing you could do for them.
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I think given all the different imperatives - getting energy to Africa, security of energy, climate change, that we should be spending half as much as we spend on health, which will get you all the way up to $15 billion - the health people don't like it when things get compared to their number.
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So on the demand side [for energy], there have been a variety of policies that globally have been way over $50 billion a year of tax credits, raising the price of electricity through things like renewable portfolio standards, so the total amount of money that's gone into sending a price signal to push up demand versus what would happen without it has been gigantic.
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During the past two centuries, innovation has more than doubled our life span and given us cheap energy and more food. If we project what the world will be like 10 years from now without continuing innovation in health, energy or food, the picture is dark.
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Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. And so, what we're going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles.
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If you're using first-class land for biofuels, then you're competing with the growing of food. And so you're actually spiking food prices by moving energy production into agriculture.
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The US in some ways has been the best. Who figured out shale gas? Although that wasn't a good thing [for CO2 levels], it was very innovative. It's led to low-cost energy. Who figured out nuclear power? Largely the United States. Once you get past the steam engine, which is mostly British, then the US has been at the center of most of the energy things that have happened.
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Really advanced civilization is based on advances in energy.
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Energy innovation is not a nationalistic game.
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If you really could take the CO2, when you burn hydrocarbons - coal, for example - if you could really capture the carbon and sequester it - they call it CCS - if the extra capital cost, energy cost, and storage costs over time didn't make it super expensive, then that's another path that you could go down.
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I have a particular relationship with Vinod Khosla because he's got a lot of very interesting science-based energy startups.
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In energy, you have to plan and do research way in advance, sometimes decades in advance to get a new system that's safer, doesn't require us to go around the world to get all our oil.
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At some point, that risk-taking private capital can take over, and have patents and trade secrets and things that let them lead the way, which happened with the steam engine and some other things, although with energy, the time of adoption is a lot longer than it is with, say, IT products or even medical advances, like drugs and vaccines.
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