Climate-focused investment fund Breakthrough Energy has just released its first ever annual report on the state of the energy transition.
The report titled “The State of the Transition” details the progress made so far by climate companies and their technologies aimed at securing a clean energy future.
Accompanying the report is an open letter from Breakthrough Energy founder Bill Gates, which opens with the description of 2023 as ‘a year of climate dissonance’.
On the downside, the letter says this year was filled with natural disasters and an ever-increasing amount of greenhouse gasses (GHG) being emitted into the atmosphere.
But on the flipside, Gates says, the year has left him feeling more hopeful than ever before thanks to the amount of innovation that has been booming, so much so that he went on to say the world has entered the Clean Industrial Revolution.
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“In many cases, this document provides an update on ideas, technologies, and policies profiled in my 2021 book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. All are worthy of more investment and attention, but there are three that we’re talking more and more about at Breakthrough Energy: hydrogen, carbon removal, and the electricity grid,” the letter says.
According to Gates, these three main technologies are what will likely be the ‘fast-forward buttons’ of decarbonization.
And while the report does praise the amount of work done so far in labs and test sites by scientists, engineers and innovators, it does acknowledge the challenge ahead of bringing these novel solutions “into the real world.”
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