London, SAEDNEWS: Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates and U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson are pouring a combined £400 million into scaling up underinvested green technologies to cut carbon emissions in Britain.
The two announced the pledge at the Global Investment Summit Tuesday. The event, designed to promote investment in Britain ahead of the COP26 climate summit, has attracted 200 investors — including big-name bankers at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Blackrock — with nearly £10 billion in deals announced.
“When the green premium is very high, you need to activate innovation,” Gates said during a discussion with Johnson at the event.
The tie-up will see Gates’ firm, Breakthrough Energy, and the U.K. government put up £200 million each to boost projects in green hydrogen, long-term energy battery storage, sustainable aviation fuels and direct air capture of carbon.
“We will scale those up and bring down that cost,” Gates said. Technologies like green hydrogen, he said, are currently “ridiculously expensive.” Gates said we wants to make them as affordable as wind and solar power.
The government committed at least £200 million to these technologies last November as part of its £1 billion Net Zero Innovation Portfolio.
The British state will also tell Gates' Breakthrough Energy Catalyst which projects to funnel investments into. “We'll make sure that we have private sector management power behind those projects,” Gates said.
“What we’re saying today is we want to invest in the [technologies] that are not attracting the support that they might,” Johnson said. Lowering the cost, the British leader added, will help “support countries that are a long way off” from meeting their Paris Agreement carbon emissions reduction targets (Source: Politico).
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