As the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference kicks off today in Paris, tech heavyweights including Microsoft, Facebook and Salesforce have joined forces to launch the ‘Breakthrough Energy Coalition’ programme.
Other participants of the programme include Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner, Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Softbank founder Masayoshi Son
The group has a collective net worth of more than $350bn.
The group will invest in early-stage energy companies to bring their creations to marketplace in an attempt to make zero-carbon energy available to everyone at an affordable price.
The investment will focus on a number of sectors including electricity generation and storage, transportation, industrial use agriculture, and energy system efficiency.
Similarly, 20 countries have pledged support for ‘Mission Innovation’, promising to double their public investments in basic energy research over the next five years and making clean energy widely affordable.
The countries who have pledged to become a part of ‘Mission Innovation’ include US, China , India, Japan Australia, Brazil, Canada, Chile who collectively represent more than 80% of current global spending on energy research, reported the Wall Street Journal.
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Mission Innovation is aimed at narrowing the gaps in government funding by commercialising scalable ideas coming out of public research institutions.
Over the next five years, the participating countries are expected to increase their annual spending on basic research and development to $20bn from current levels of about $10bn.
