Bill Gates-led $1B energy fund expands startup portfolio fighting climate change
qz.comI wrote this article, and I'm happy to field any questions
No question. Just cool that you are here responding to them. Really interesting article. Also read the CFS feature. Also very interesting. Should note the link to the Carbon Cement feature goes to the CFS feature instead.
Corrected the cement feature link. Thanks!
Is there a way you would recommend that a bay area clean energy startup reach out to the fund?
I'm curious about why you included this sentence: 'The startups announced by BEV so far are all North American, and most of their leadership is also largely white and male'
I mean, isn't it enough for BEV to help fund a small sample of companies tackling some of the most challenging problems on earth? Probability of success in such an endeavour is already vanishingly small without adding further constraints. Aren't investments like these best directed at the companies with most promise, with the investors blind as to gender and race, with equality problems tackled elsewhere (e.g. in employment regulation etc.)?
It's ludicrous to think good ideas only come from North America and white males. Carmichael Roberts agreed with me. His words were that my question felt "piercing" because he was not at liberty to tell me about some of the companies outside the US with diverse leadership, but he said he will soon say more. Rodi Guidero agreed and said to look at the BEV team. It's very diverse: http://www.b-t.energy/ventures/team/
We've tried being gender and race blind. But it's not helped us much, because systemic biases can't simply be overcome that way. There are good ideas in all corners, but if you want to elevate those that don't come from privileged backgrounds you have to work harder.
'It's ludicrous to think good ideas only come from North America and white males'
That's a straw man argument because I did not assert that (and obviously wouldn't because it would be a stupid thing to think).
Maybe he thought your question was piercing because it implied you suspected he was racist or sexist or not concerned with gender and race bias.
Fwiw I'm from one of the excluded categories. I think they should just focus on tackling carbon reduction as they see best fit. If they achieve their mission it'll benefit every man, woman and child on earth. It's unreasonable to expect them to be omniscient. They are a small fund with a small sample of investments. Skew doesn't necessarily mean they have gender or race bias.
Elevating isn't their goal. Reducing carbon is. If we don't do that, there may be no races left to worry about equalising.
I think you can do both. If anybody has the resources to do that, BEV does.
It would certainly be laudable if they could. The article was fascinating, thanks for answering questions!
That's a terrible idea. They should be focused on finding winners regardless of diversity.
"It's ludicrous to think good ideas only come from North America and white males."
Sure, not what gp said, but agreed.
"but if you want to elevate those that don't come from privileged backgrounds"
Just some unsolicited feedback, the original race/gender quote from the article and this statement leads me to interpret that you either value equality of outcome (EG: all of these startups should have proportional distributions of gender and race in all positions) over technological advancements, or that you suspect the organization is biased to some detrimental degree.
This feedback isn't meant to insinuate that you actually believe either, just that it was my interpretation from the seemingly out of context nod to race/genders of the startup founders.
For example, if you'd have included a quote along the lines of "The startups announced by BEV so far are all above 6' tall". The statement would seem to insinuate that there's either something wrong with being 6' tall (analogous to something wrong with being white/male), or that the organization seems to unfairly favor tall people.
There is nothing wrong with being a white male nor with being 6 foot tall. But maybe there is something wrong when white males are overrepresented (in my opinion there is).
Also, there is no historical bias towards 6-foot people. But there was, and is, a lot of bias towards white males. For me it's fair enough to call that out.
> but if you want to elevate those that don't come from privileged backgrounds you have to work harder.
I'm not white yet from a very privileged background. I find the way you so casually equate ethnic origin and social background to be quite shocking frankly.
Since when have we tried to be gender or race blind? Martin Luther King preached that, but policy has never been toward gender and race blindness. Gender and race blindness is an untried concept. It would be nice to try.
We've tried in some ways. What do you think no-discrimination policy is at work is about?
> Probability of success in such an endeavour is already vanishingly small without adding further constraints.
Wouldn't only choosing North American startups (along with having a largely white and male leadership ) be a constraint in itself? Either way, the next part states it will be more international when the companies go public over time.
Now, that's not to say they've specifically gone out and chose startups with a white male leadership but I've seen places try to explain this away by saying they "chose the best person for the job" which sounds awfully familiar to "companies with most promise".
> These startups progress slowly and at great expense, earning them the moniker “tough tech” because they work on difficult problems that require fundamental breakthroughs.
I am genuinely curious if for-profit startups is the right setting for "fundamental breakthroughs". Could the current nuclear power technology have been invented by a startup for example?
I guess the answer depends on which country you're talking about. The U.S. government pioneered nuclear power but has done very little with it over the past several decades, and has impeded private efforts. Canada has a regulatory system friendlier to reactor startups than the U.S., and at least one molten salt reactor company (Terrestrial Energy) is making good progress there. China has an aggressive government program developing every type of GenIV reactor, and Terrapower moved there after giving up on the U.S.
This article mainly covers the MIT fusion effort. For years they struggled to keep their government funding, despite their tokamak having the most powerful magnetic field of any in the world. They finally lost that battle, and now private investors are stepping in. It doesn't appear that there was an alternative.
Government can obviously throw more money but it tends to be more conservative about what it funds. And private funding can go pretty far; it was interesting to see that TAE (Tri Alpha Energy, an aneutronic fusion effort) is up to $800 million in funding. They started work in 1999, so long-term fundamental research does seem to be achievable in a startup setting.
Besides, comparing the efficacy or ability of government's in 1940s wartime vs the modern nation states is a terrible idea and is very weakly related. In terms of pure scale, administrative top heaviness, legislative/regulatory oversight has expanded 100x in the past century, the degree of economic intervention, access to talent in peacetime, etc are all vastly different.
Even NASA in the peacetime 1950-60s which was so famously efficient and effective was largely the result of talent quickly absorbed from private industry and academia into one organization. It was a newish organization which held many of the benefits of non-gov/private organizations, as they were not yet fully affected by the heavy bureaucratic and political load which hits every government agency over time.
The type of stuff that scares away the raw talent and creatives and shifts to a system which values people who play politics and shifts power to administrative roles over the producers. https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
If a self-sustaining nuclear fission reaction had not been previously demonstrated, could you build a proof-of-concept in 2018 on a startup budget? I would say yes. It is conceivable that you could build a modern equivalent of Chicago Pile-1 on a startup budget, assuming that you didn't implement any more safety features than the original CP-1. And if nuclear fission had never been demonstrated before this hypothetical startup probably wouldn't have much in the way of safety regulations to consider.
The more difficult question: how would a startup come to experiment with ways to build a self-sustaining fission reaction if the basic concept hadn't been demonstrated before? Something would have to be very different about history. As an improbable hand-wave, let's say that academic scientists had only ever experimented with fast-neutron fission, and didn't realize that natural uranium could sustain a chain reaction if the neutrons were moderated. We're probably deep into alt-history "World War II never happened, also the world has been surprisingly peaceful" fiction with that hand-wave.
Finally, if you really mean current nuclear power technology, e.g. one of the actual Generation III reactor designs currently operating, plus supporting infrastructure -- no, a startup could not invent all of that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_III_reactor#Generat...
You could easily blow through 100 million dollars just trying to prototype the enrichment process for the uranium that your reactor needs as fuel. Never mind actually sourcing enough natural uranium in a world where uranium has previously been a niche material like rubidium, building a uranium enrichment plant, fabricating fuel elements, forging a huge pressure vessel, developing the whole field of nuclear engineering...
Actually uranium at various enrichments is cheaper than ever. SWU cost last year was $125.43/SWU https://www.eia.gov/uranium/marketing/
Right, that's true in the actual world. I'm trying to imagine a world where a startup is developing nuclear power for the very first time, which includes developing/building any enrichment technologies their reactor might depend upon.
I don't think that a reactor requiring enriched fuel is a good Very First Reactor design -- and the actual first reactors did not require enriched fuel -- but enrichment came up in the course of answering whether a startup could invent a modern reactor in the absence of an existing nuclear industry.
Possibly a nuclear industry kicked off by startups would use different technology. It may be no coincidence that we used a gigantic price-insensitive entity to develop the early technology, and ended up with expensive reactors.
Molten salt reactors, for example, were known back in the 1950s, and appear to have a number of major cost advantages.
Molten salt reactors might be the second generation of reactors in an alternative history with nuclear-by-startups. They require a higher fissile material concentration than found in natural uranium. To start operating a MSR you need some reactors fueled with natural uranium and moderated by graphite or heavy water in order to breed fissile plutonium from uranium, or uranium 233 from thorium, to get concentrated fissile material for starting molten salt reactors.
Or you could start a MSR with U-235 enriched from natural uranium, but that would require developing complex and expensive enrichment technology before you get your first watt of nuclear power generation.
True, and maybe a CANDU would be best at first if enrichment is a huge barrier. But MSRs don't necessarily need especially high enrichment. The IMSR for example only needs 5% U235, which is the upper end of what light water reactors use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Molten_Salt_Reactor
> ... 500 million metric tons.
Or more simply, 500 million tonnes.
A metric ton is substantially different to a ton in the old English
Hence the nice people behind metric came up with the tonne.
It avoids any ambiguity -- the 5% of the planet still struggling with imperial measurements can continue to confound each other with ton, while the rest of us can confidently talk amongst ourselves about thousand-kg units (tonnes).
>It avoids any ambiguity
My first language is not English and I am using metric, and to me using metric ton or metric tonne removes ambiguity. I know Americans have a ton that is different from a normal ton, but have no idea about how much it is, and it is not used often enough for me to even consider it exist. I would assume 5 tonnes if it was written as 5 ton, 5 metric tons, 5 tonnes or 5 metric tonnes
Sure, but I feel it's a regression.
I recently saw (online) a North American try to use a date format of:
yyyy-dd-mm .... I don't know why, but it was done in earnest, and it's the sort of thing that could (if it gained any kind of widespread usage) destroy much of the great work done by the ISO 8601 date/time standard.
A small thing for people who never have to deal with date formats outside their own country -- but a significant concern for people who do.
Similarly, the word tonne means a metric unit of 1000kg.
Trying to dilute the meaning by introducing phrasing such as 'metric ton' or 'metric tonne' or 'imperial tonne' (perish the thought!) is a similar regression. Journals - as the curators of common usage - have an important role to play here.
I think we can either surrender, weaken the language, give up, and defer to the confused minority, or we can stick with the sensible, previously agreed definitions and hope they catch up to us in the next lifetime or two.
>yyyy-dd-mm
how, what, why? Who would do something like that? The best is for all to stop using outdated imperial systems and forget that there is another ton than the one that is 1000 kg
Look I love the metric system as much as anyone, but it’s an American website and a lot more than 5% of the readers are likely American...
> ... but it’s an American website ...
I'm really never quite sure what that kind of claim actually means -- it's hosted in the US (it isn't - most of the assets come from proximal CDN for me), it's written exclusively by Americans (it isn't - they are proud of the fact their team covers 115 countries and they have 19 languages between them), it's targeted exclusively to Americans (it isn't - they've launched Quartz India and Quartz Africa), or it's read mostly by Americans (it isn't - I believe their US audience is something less than 50%), or it's owned by Americans (it isn't - Quartz is owned by a Japanese based company), or the person reading it is in North America and wants to believe that most other people are too(I can't really comment on that one).
Perhaps it's just the TLD -- but even that's a pretty flimsy claim. I've got my own .org, and I'm very much not in/owned/near/have/were American.
Anyway, there's this word tonne (which means 1000kg) and it's entirely not at odds with ton (which doesn't).
Unlike gallon, gill, mile, nautical mile, survey foot, quart, pint, fluid ounce, bushel -- which all vary depending which side of the pond you call home -- the tonne is delightfully agnostic of all that madness, and should be embraced and encouraged by sensible journals (for example Quartz) even if it means some North Americans get a bit sensitive about their archaic measurement systems.
That's the reason. Thanks for helping me out here.
Zero Mass Water: A startup selling specialized panels that use solar power and batteries to pull water from the air. The goal is to reduce the amount of energy needed to access clean drinking water without geographical limitations.
There is a lot of energy involved in the phase change of water. We've also had dehumidifiers for over 100 years. The takeaway from that is, dehumidifiers produce don't produce water well in arid environments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc7WqVMCABg
This makes me wonder if the Gates Foundation is properly utilizing scientific expertise.
So the tech inside Zero Mass Water is not the same as dehumidifier. Instead, they use a sophisticated absorbent to selectively capture water, heat it to release the water, then sterilize and add minerals.
But you're right. It's the company that I was most surprised to see in the list. The economics don't yet make sense to me.
I pushed Carmichael Roberts (BEV's head of investing) to explain. He said he has studied water startups for years, and he really likes the tech. But more importantly, he is very impressed by Cody's skill to sell this unit and far wide. It's already in 16 countries.
Instead, they use a sophisticated absorbent to selectively capture water, heat it to release the water, then sterilize and add minerals.
So it's using a dessicant? Heating a saturated dessicant in an enclosed environment can produce a hot, high humidity environment where dehumidification is easy. That said, it will still produce the most water someplace like San Francisco, where the humidity is high. There are places where humidity is high and the rainfall is very low.
Apparently, Zero Mass Water is using some good engineering to get something like a 4X efficiency increase for water extraction over existing commercial dessicant dehumidifiers. It's possible that removing the requirement to process large volumes of air could produce such an efficiency increase.
Stupid question, is this targeted at producing water or is it targeted at producing clean water where contaminated water is available?
It's targeted at producing water by extracting it from the air.
>more importantly, he is very impressed by Cody's skill to sell this unit and far wide
That is a really bad reason to invest, given the stated aims of the fund.
I absolutely agree with you - this is bad allocation of money and effort.
I just cannot think of a niche where these units would actually make sense.
It is a terrible idea to use these for disaster relief - never mind the cost, it would be better to ship in an equal weight of water.
It is wrong to use these wherever there is salt water, or polluted water - it would be far cheaper to purify whatever water there is.
And it is a bad idea to use them at remote locations, as emergency supplies or wherever reliability is important. Again, equal weight of bottled water would be much cheaper, and safer - bottled water will not break down.
I invite anybody (Mr Carmichael Roberts or company itself) to outline a scenario where this technology is preferred over reverse osmosis, or bottled water. The "Applications" page on the company web site demonstrates IMO 100% wastefully inappropriate applications. Happy to comment on any specific one of those.
Yes it is energy intensive but it's for a niche application:
Allowing access for clean water in areas where it is prohibitively more expensive (monetarily and energy wise) to get clean water. Think remote or disaster stricken areas (with appropriate conditions to use the device).
Start familiarizing yourself with the term "deep adaptation".