Bill Gates Sets His Sights on Energy

Bill Gates is nobody’s fool.  A college chum who went on to become one of Microsoft’s first 50 employees told me that, though Gates was always willing to make time for presentations from  his staff, he took a very dim view of these who wasted his time.  And unfortunately, that career-limiting tragedy was all too commonplace, because Gates himself was so incredibly knowledgeable on a wide range of topics related to IT, and would ferociously dismantle those who came in without having thought through all the ramifications of the concepts they were presenting.

Here’s an article from the American Energy Society that discusses Gates’ main focus today: averting climate disaster with “miraculous” developments in clean energy.  “I’ve seen miracles,” says Gates, “the personal computer, the Internet, the polio vaccine.”

Yes, but what’s at stake here is based on laws of physics that seem to defy scale. Moore’s law has accurately predicted that doubling the capacity to perform logic operations on a chip of a certain size would happen every two years, but the physics associated with energy generation seems to make anything like that impossible.

So, what will be required for an energy “moonshot,” i.e., the equivalent of putting a man on the moon?  I hope you’ll check out the article.