Bill Gates Talks About the Future of Energy

so thank you for being here the Gates Foundation focuses on health it focuses on development it focuses on education in the United States it does not focus on

energy

so why are we here? Well, I spend a good portion of my time on

energy

for a couple of reasons. One is that if you want to improve the situation of the poorest two

bill

ion on the planet by lowering the price of energy substantially, it would be the best thing that could be done for them, since fertilizers are basically energy and their ability to obtain their inputs. get to where they live, their ability to get their products out, their ability to get jobs and other things, energy is what allowed civilization over the last 200 years to change everything dramatically and therefore, if you want to reach the rest of civilization and provide them with lighting services, refrigeration services, the cost of energy must be greatly reduced, it is definitive along with the restriction of carbon, which I believe is very important, in part because what it does to tropical agriculture is that it makes it practically impossible if you get enough The warming that seasonal culture is actually about is a net beneficiary due to rising CO2 concentrations and certain places where the heat is good, but tropical agriculture, which is where the poorest live , it is a disaster and you have said that we must not only stop growth, but also reduce carbon emissions but reach zero the objective has to be zero because well you will never reach absolute zero but if you want there to be no greater warming every year you have to get to extremely low numbers there is enough of the carbon stays around 10,000 years, because of the way the balances get to the ocean, what we are asking civilization to do here is very, very dramatic if it were just a factor two reduction, that would be very simple, but it's not like that, this is something that is ultra different.

You know, every year civilization produces more CO2. There is not a single year in which we emit less to anyone. We had the economic recession because China and India are advancing and that is why the idea of ​​reaching an 80% reduction, in reality you have to have a year in which you get less, it is a mathematical question and then you have to have years in which the ones you get much less, so it is very difficult for us to achieve any of that. One of the goals we have set seems very daunting, so listened to the conversation between Dan Jurgen and Vinod Khosla.

The question was: "Do we know how long it will take until only fifty percent of our global energy needs, compared to 80 percent today, are met?" fulfilled by fossil fuels Vinod said 25 years Dan said 40 years right you said 2050 what is your answer to that question well if these are numerical questions that is correct so you have to look at the different sectors like power generation , transportation, industrial use and say For you, what is possible apart from Daniel Yergin, the best writer in the energy space is Vaslav Smith and he has at least a dozen books that are worth reading, but two that are quite concise and I highly recommend our energy myths and realities and energy. transitions and they are both economic and numerical on the question of how difficult it is, how long it is, how difficult it is to change our energy system, so if we take any of these sectors, let's just take electricity generation, the designs that we know today are that we will allow and build over the next 20 years and those plants will last the lowest life of any plant, even an attic or a speaker, is about 30 years, so the notion that that sector and the same logic applies on the other, the notion that that sector will be fifty percent hydrocarbon-free in 50 years, it may not be, not even in 50 years, no, no, so you go further than even Dan Jurgen when, well, they want say, when, when do you think we could get there? to global consumption fifty percent or both.

I think the two basic opinions I have is that people underestimate how difficult it is to make these changes, that is, they look at intermittent energy sources, they don't think about storage and transmission, they look at things that they are deeply subsidized and they forget that they are deeply subsidized, they look only at the rich world and they don't look at where all the energy growth is happening, which is in the middle and low income areas, so I think the problem is much more difficult than many observers believe I'm in the Smeal camp in this sense, but I also think to counter that a little and here I very much agree with the observation that the potential for innovation, not innovation, in the next ten years because you have to invent over the next ten years, but the innovations that will start to be implemented within, say, 20 years mean that we can be quite dramatic in terms of the first derivative in terms of the rate of change. and then, if we take a period of like 75 years, if we really fund basic research at a reasonable level, which the United States doesn't do, other countries don't do, if we have policies to encourage experimentation, which you know, we just we take any of the nuclear carbon capture things we have.

We're not doing a good job on that streaming storage, if you do the right thing, there's a chance to meet very aggressive goals within 75 years, talking 75 years and beyond, to get less than 50 percent on your way steel. Well, you can do it. get the first derivative to be such that you can go well below 50% because the power plants you build between now and say 2025 you will be in a position to start replacing them in the 2060 time frame, so if it were hard corn and could cut to the chase because the economy it would actually end its life in maybe a decade from now and made sure that all new construction had zero CO2 emissions, I mean, whatever the winning technology is, so I think can be achieved.

I think people underestimate what can be done in the short term thanks to this installed base Mahna Mahna you can get the new plants to change within 30 years, you certainly know that by the 20th an overestimation could be made by 50 us, if we do good work on innovation, we could have all the The new plants and Richworld will have zero CO2 emissions, but it would still take your dean longer before we reach 50% of that installed base, so he has said that there are five miracles what we need to make this happen. Can you talk about those? five no we don't need five we need one of the five just one well we need some of these or things combined so if we take the time yeah let's take carbon capture if natural gas supplies continue to expand and the drilling technology understands geology through digital techniques continues to improve all you need to do is capture carbon and be willing to pay for it it is expensive to capture it from the flu there is a bit of expense for storage, you must have the regulator that takes a long-term responsibility that essentially has to be with the government, but that hasn't been done, so you can imagine a

future

where you're just using a lot of natural gas and you can make an extremely good catch, like a 95 catch %. which means some innovation 70 80 percent capture we understand that it is too expensive and that it is not a high enough percentage for that miracle alone to help you go very far because the planet has a lot of coal and a lot of natural gas the next miracle these are minerals Until now, nuclear energy is not particularly popular in Japan and Germany and has never been that puppet, even in France.

The French public is more negative toward nuclear power than the American public, so even though they are 70 percent of the electricity we have. more nuclear plants than them, we have more than 100 nuclear plants out of the 400 in the world, so we are the absolute largest generator of nuclear electricity, but yes, but personally you were investing in nuclear energy, so the plants that There are basically first and second generation plants in the world today, there are some generation 3 plants, included in the conference, Westinghouse Toshiba talked about the AP1000, which is a third generation plant, and the Arriva EPR are the second generation plants. generation, I think a lot of AP 1000s can be built and I think partly because what the Chinese are doing is by far an advantage, a lot of them can be built, so the Chinese have this 80 gigawatt goal, assuming that there are no more accidents, but unfortunately that can be done because their demand increases a lot. it only takes you to at most, let's say, 12% of the best case of Chinese energy that I'm investing in and not because I expect to make a lot of money from it, it's because I think it's zero CO2 because the economics are so Well, it's a fourth generation design and there are many fourth generation designs.

This is very, very attractive from an economic point of view. I mean, much cheaper than the current one. You can not? We had Nathan Myhrvold here last year, but can you explain a little bit about how? This technology works well, basically, you are among friends here, yes, absolutely, the part of uranium that is fissile that is, when you hit it with a neutron, it splits in two is about 0.7% and when the atom of uranium in two. You get a million times more energy than you get from burning a molecule of carbon, so you think: wow, this is a good technology, it's a million times better, now you have to take advantage of that factor of a million advantage and say, oh, break down that thing that it's divided into. that's radioactive that's bad cesium stop some short half-lives that means it's intensely radioactive some long half-lives that means it's around for a long time so basically the reactors that we have today are burning that point seven percent and that works quite a bit. well a long time ago there was a concept that you would make a different type of reactor called a fast reactor that would produce a bunch of another element called plutonium and then you would take it out and then you would burn that thing called reproduction and a fast reactor that is bad because we assume that The material for nuclear weapons is plutonium, it is complicated, the processing you have to do is not only environmentally difficult, but it is also extremely expensive.

The concept of this so-called Terra energy reactor is that in the same reactor you burn and reproduce, and so instead of producing plutonium and then extracting it, we take uranium, the part that is 99.3% with which nothing is normally done , we convert it and burn it to be like a candle, candle wax does not burn at room temperature. the flame turns it into liquid and it burns, so it is like a candle. Our flame is taking the normal depleted uranium, that 99.3%, which is very cheap and there is plenty of it in Paducah, Kentucky, which is enough to feed the United States. for hundreds and hundreds of years you take that and you turn it into lutonium and then you burn it and we have super high power densities, you know, the Fiat total safety system in any reactor that a human has to do something that is a little bit scary what's the scale, is scale important here or is it the same as the Terra power reactor, the current design is about the same scale, it's usually somewhere around a gigawatt type design due to the surface-volume relationship.

The first design we're doing doesn't scale down very well, now we have another design that works for the smaller type, more like a hundred megawatt and two hundred megawatt design, but our first design, which on paper really was that good, and one thing to highlight. What stands out is that digital simulation and this applies all these energy technologies, the ability to simulate things digitally is different day and night than in the past, when they built, they say, the reactor in Fukushima, their ability to simulate things It was very limited, they wouldn't really know what our reactor takes, you know, we have magnitude 10 earthquakes, we have volcanoes that explode, we have tidal waves that pass and we look and say, okay, let's put something more concrete, you can understand what is going to happen digitally in a way it never could before and so the idea of ​​gen3 full passive safety gets us to much, much better passive safety, not full passive safety jen for whoever Gen 4 is built there won't be a need for a ser human, you know, there is no zirconium that turns into hydrogen to explode. type design schedule for Terra power, okay this is really fast, you won't be surprised in 2022 if everything goes perfectly, our demonstration reactor will be in place and by 2028 again, assuming everything continues to work perfectly, it will be a design that could be replicated and built. in many many many places you could hunt at that point because you have no fuel restrictions and according to me you have extremely good economics, good security, no waste proliferation, so you could go crazy if everything is going perfectly absolute how ? often everything goes perfectly in nuclear energy, well, you know, if you ignore, no, no,Come on, if you ignore 1979, 1986 and 2011, come on, we've had a good century, ah, no, seriously, I mean, in terms of raw numbers, you know, coal mining is natural.

More people are dying, I mean, it wasn't far from here and the natural gas, you know, the pipelines exploded and incinerated people, so you know it's important to keep in perspective that nuclear power in terms of a safety record. Overall it is better than others. participant, okay, so we got two miracles, we got the card, we captured the miracle, the nuclear miracle, you are missing three miracles, well, you can have a miracle, have to do that now the rest of these energy sources are energy sources low density intermittent response, so the only really dense, you know you take a piece of land and you can put a lot of energy and you can put it anywhere in the world that is hydrocarbons and nuclear energy, those are energy factories, everything else is cultivation of energy, whether biofuel from solar wind, so the amount of land and the place where it can be done properly and in the case of wind and sun the intermittency creates a big problem because society depends a lot on reliable energy .

Power isn't one of these. The things where you say "Oh, the hospital can't keep your heart monitor going" come back in a couple of hours, you just know we're addicted to super reliable power and there's a lot of weirdness to this. If you bring intermittent sources, literally the price of energy. during the period when the wind blows could be as low as just a marginal cost for natural gas for poker and then the entire price will be at the time when the wind is not blowing, so reliable systems that require integration are very different economically than just coming in and being a 5% or 10% aggregator, particularly when there is an artificial economy in terms of production tax credit exhaustion and very artificial in terms of bidding on your wind farm right now, in many cases if you do not deliver you are not penalized, this does not sound very optimistic, well, then the next three miracles, whether solar, biofuel or wind, and biofuel include solar chemicals, where you really move away from the normal photosynthetic process.

Musa, other processes, they all require storage and transmission, so these are miracles where you have to have a source of energy that is extremely economical and you have to have storage, you have to have transmission, storage, you mean batteries, oh , it can be hydro, you can lift heavy objects to the top. from the mountain and roll them down, maybe they are hot, sodium batteries would be the most efficient, right? Not necessarily if you have the right geographic features. Another good energy author is David McKay, spelled McKay, who took the UK by storm. It is a brilliant book. it's a must read because it actually tells you why cars use energy, how that could change, why the house will use energy, how that could change, why airplanes use energy, how that could change, it takes it, it adds it up. and then it says okay, given even very optimistic assumptions: here's how much power will be needed and here are the options for how to get it.

It has a chapter on water storage and yes, there are places where you can do some water storage, but you pumped water to the top of the mountain and then, perfectly, which is actually used almost anywhere, it has the characteristics suitable, that it has really good efficiency, that low capital cost and good efficiency batteries today are not in the same league, now you know the nodes that support many battery companies. directly supporting many battery companies, batteries and compressed air are interesting because they may be obtainable. I even have a gravity storage company that I'm involved with.

You could get numbers that are very, very good and would help a lot. Then intermittent. Storage can come, but you must add the cost of the batteries or battery equivalent, whatever the storage, to the cost of your written material. If you ride the stuff until it goes down to full power, it's basically gravel on the lifts, so if you have a period of power availability, you take the lift on your lift and pour gravel on it, yeah, and then if you don't you have power, you take the gravel that's not at the top of the hill and you put it on the lift and it actually regulates the frequency as well as generating power.

All of these systems are fairly simple to characterize their capital cost and there is a level of efficiency that bypasses biofuels fairly quickly. Vinod was very excited before dinner about the wood chips. Will Can, would the splinters take us there? That counts as a miracle. What happens to groundhogs? Their ability to breed groundhogs is incredible. How did they come up with that? I don't know venture capital. Oh no, it has a company key or something. uses a proprietary catalyst for dioxins to originate these sources, biomass sources do not look like hybrid carbon sources, they have a lot of nitrogen and oxygen, so converting them into energy or liquid fuel is quite difficult, and there are many, many. ways to do it, as said, none of them yet or that economical, you now have a few that are scaling up their pilot plants right now and the numbers actually look pretty good, but can you do it on a large enough scale to change that global energy curve basically yes?

If your main interest is the price of gasoline and biofuels, you can't come with ethanol because that was artificial in terms of how it was subsidized, but even getting cheap biofuels like wood chips and that may require even 10 or 15 percent. percent of the gasoline market, if you combine that with a certain degree of electrification, let's say ten percent, which says that it is modest and then the efficiency, there is no other company that I love, that has this really efficient engine, there is several of those, but he has one of them, yes. If you combine all those things and you get, say, a 30 to 40 percent reduction in the use of liquid hydrocarbons in rich countries, then you completely change the economy of supply and demand.

Yes, there is a depletion of the field, but there is also innovation and drilling techniques, so if things like that come together, the idea that it would cost $100 a barrel can probably go down to 50 or 60 if it is reduced a lot below that, many of you get an offer, a significant reduction of the offer at that point, so long term because things like that I think it can go up to 10% and I think all those things can happen. I think the price of oil will tend to go down. I think the price after gas, for a variety of reasons, will tend to go up and you know, can you get it?

I'm above 10%, okay, I'm willing to be surprised if biofuels, including wood chips, can reach 30 or 40 percent of the liquid fuel supply. That impresses you a lot. I think the logistics and cost make it difficult, but that's the point. capital letters, basically, for each of these five paths we need at least 200 crazy people who think that their idea alone can solve, you are not calling a crazy node, no, he supports the crazy people, okay, he is the payer of the PayPal update. of which we will declare sane at some point in the

future

and you're saying we don't need all these miracles any of them a couple well we need you to have transportation transportation is special where you have to have solar energy chemical work or it's difficult because they are their sources individual points those that emit CO2 are not so much so if you cannot convert transport into electric and convert electric into zero CO2 if transport continues to be based on liquid fuels because If we do not have the miracle of the mobile battery on which many people are working and some people think it can be solved, some reasonable people don't think it can, so you need carbon-neutral biofuels or you need some kind of open air. carbon capture, so there are companies that are a little crazy too, including one that I called carbon engineering that literally captures free air, meaning the wind that passes by, and they have this device, someone here in the room saying have a card that does it. capture while driving down the road that's another possibility the scale of a car as a power plant the percentage of capture you can do is extremely unlikely economically you can say 95 percent capture is likely to still be unless you've done fuel in a carbon-neutral way you are unlikely to completely recapture it, do you put odds on each of these miracles? or yes, it is quite difficult.

I believe that, for the good of society, we must fund basic energy research at least twice. As much as we do it now, that's great. I was going to ask you what needs to happen for these things to happen, that a government investigation like that would increase the odds, and if you take nuclear space, does the United States do that? Do I have the guts, money or will to go out and make new design demo plants, probably not. I mean, when Terra Powers was launched, I went to the Secretary of Energy and said, hey, how can you test this?

U.S. and you know it was a big help, you know we work with National Labs in a great relationship, but the possibility, for a variety of reasons, of the government funding such things and the regulator approving them in the U.S. .US is very, very low, so that is a path that really depends on some country other than the US to do it to build the demonstration plan, many of the invention ideas come from a tradition of work. with fast reactors here in the United States, that's really brilliant, but it will have to be a very international project, more government funding, what else?

It would help speed up the transition, well, some of these things, like carbon capture, if you have to impose a serious carbon tax, which is the most important thing, it doesn't have to come into effect immediately, but people have to believe that so it will be. come into action significantly during the life of the power plants, so that their decisions about the power plants change and therefore the people who invent and supply the power plants are incentivized to devise power plants with low CO2 content, which is the biggest failure of our energy. The policy is to not have carbon taxes at least in the 10 to 15 time frame and you really hope to have them and we are further from that today than we were four years ago.

Yes, that particular

bill

had some serious flaws. terms of how the system worked, but yes, the House passed a surprisingly hard-to-believe bill that would have taken a radical and significant step in that direction, whether that happens or not is hard to say, but it's what it should . This happens because it drives both conservation and innovation. I want to open it up to questions in just a minute, but another question because we spent a lot of time today before you got here talking about natural gas and the effect that it has had. In your opinion, in this whole equation, is it a good thing or a bad thing?

Does it delay change or help Britain create a bridge for change? If you leave aside climate change, which is a big problem, I leave it aside. The natural gas thing is a phenomenon, it's great and the upper limit of what could be out there in different layers, different drilling technologies, fracking technologies, it's quite surprising that there could be dramatically more reserves than the proven ones we have now, and there's a lot of innovation that can take place there, so that's a very good thing, the price of electricity is very important and you know it looks like shale gas is available in many geographies around the world, in fact, the estimate for China is that even though they haven't done it.

I haven't really started, it's actually higher than the United States, so they are very stupid, so go for gas and stop worrying, well, no, because unfortunately, although natural gas has less CO2 emissions per unit of energy, people may argue that it is less. Of half, a natural gas leak occurs during processing. Ch4 is a gas, it is a very powerful deworming molecule, so any leak in your system is dramatically negative in terms of this general global household gas equation. It doesn't help, it's really no big deal, there is a recent article by Ken called Aaron Nathan Myhrvold that actually applies if you overnight switch the entire system to natural gas and therefore the 50% reduction you know that you're just going to keep warming and warming and warming and doing this experiment which in natural history is a faster rate of warming than has ever been seen in the history of the planet so in that sense it's a challenge and you know when terraPower other people look their energy things that have to be compared not with the spot price, the spot price in it, electronic electricity generators cannot calland get a 20 year contract at that two fifty price, right now they're being quoted things more in this six dollar range now. maybe at some point there will be long-term contracts five that's what you have to look at five six dollars yes and then you have to have some energy that is very economical compared to the current $5 would you rather have a higher price? marginal price of energy with that there are a lot of trade-offs involved, the ideal, by far, is to buy very cheap natural gas with a carbon tax, so even if the market price of gas to save five dollars, is taking some you know, they say forty dollars per ton of CO2 emission and the choice of that and the odds of that happening in the next few years depends on the IQ of the American public and their current and ongoing assessment over time. a numerical number that over time has worked for us.

I mean, seriously, it's easy to get too close to today's politics, but you have to tell yourself that every time you look closely politics looks pretty ugly, and yet America has managed to do the same thing. right on a variety of issues and so I think it's time for consensus to emerge and the real cost of that is reduced through innovation like natural gas innovation. Also, I'm not involved in Gen 3 nuclear power, but as Chinese manufacturing volume lowers component prices it increases off-site construction percentages Gen 3 nuclear power might surprise people. I mean, the Chinese build these things not much more than coal plants there Gen 2 and over time that gen 3 and even that their innovation should write things down so we can afford to differentiate ourselves in favor of sources that don't.

They emit CO2. Kim, where is Christina Lumpy on her route? Boston feeding batteries. Thank you and it's a pleasure to have you here thinking about this. Sorry, Christina, could you? You would relate to everyone we met in Davos, actually in the mentoring program, when entrepreneurs Thank you Boston Power, founder of energy storage and complexity, move forward with technically complicated systems that require multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary teams at a pace that no We have seen before in the need and search for new systems, how would you characterize and what advice would you give to those of us who are alive now as if you will not be alive in 75 years and active when these?

Problems have basically resulted everywhere we go , what would you like to see and what encouragement and advice would you give to anyone who is trying to put together new and complex systems in an environment that probably doesn't see the data well? In a sense, the IT revolution makes people overly optimistic about the pace of innovation, because things could happen on a small scale because companies could fail and succeed and those that succeeded could raise additional capital at these rates. very fast, you know, if you made innovations whether through swaps or pants, you could be immensely rewarded for it, it created this paradigm that is too easy compared to energy innovation, I mean, just take energy storage, do you? at what price are they going to price it?

It's a very strange system where prices are basically manipulated by rate commissions and therefore the ability to make variations over time, the price of reliability creates these extreme things where intermittent people go to hate when you actually value things properly, those flashing guys are going to look terrible until they figure out how to combine their thing with a really good storage system and this is done in 50 states and in a political environment you hope that some of them work well and it's sort of done at the ISO level, so that's confusing because it crosses state lines, you have to wait for someone to price the storage appropriately so that the innovators have a good price signal.

It's very strange, you know, we massively subsidize intermittent generation, primarily wind, and so of our energy spending as a country today, the portion that is in Rd is about 2%, the portion that goes to the production tax credit, accelerated depreciation is over 80 percent and you know people make these strange arguments about learning that the core benefits of that wind won't make you know five times cheaper than it is today and it's not going to work because it's subsidized it's not going to magically figure out how to store wind we just put it there on the blade or something and we're subject to we're spending our money very, very, very foolishly if we could subsidize the storage if we could fix the regulatory problems to the transmission, which is a huge problem.

If you compare the US and China, it's night and day, so you would understand the economy correctly, but we are spending the money we are spending, which is almost three hundred billion a year. so it's not more money, it's home BAM no, it's just more, it's not enough money if you count the government's explicit budget because the Department of Energy's budget for research is actually very modest, it's only when you count the spending on technology taxes and the price of the RPS. effect so when you bring those pieces you're spending a lot of money now it's hidden from you but you're spending a lot of money you're just spending it foolishly i got another one Kathy Besant sure thank you I'm Kathy basata who I work for Bank of America leads our global technology and operations work and He also chairs our environmental council.

You know, I'm impressed by the five miracles and I've heard you talk about some of them before. Sometimes I get lost in a sixth miracle, like restoring the credibility of the banking system, so maybe we can talk about that at some point, but when I think about the five miracles and I have no doubt that there are real technical capabilities that, today or in the future, will they put us on a path to zero carbon emissions? I wonder a lot about the political will because all you're talking about is whether it's renewing the way we provide incentives, whether it's cross-jurisdictional cooperation that has to continue, If it is changing the way we incubate until there is profitability in the sector, you know that all of that requires some element of political change and I also agree with you that our political system can be counted on on many complicated issues to do what right, but generally that happens when there is a strong will be a populist will or a national will or a corporate will and I'm wondering what you think about what is the source of the will to cause global jurisdictional political change or, in some cases, individual, which has to happen in general.

The will comes through competition and of course countries don't go bankrupt, they actually can, that's their first area, but to the extent that other countries can have cheaper energy than ours, then we'll look at that and , over time, adapt to this, there are two problems right now, one is that we have to take our willingness to spend money and be smart about it, the second is that wide adoption only happens when these things are cheap and it could happen that These things are cheap, saying China when They're not cheap here because we don't give site permits right, we don't do streaming right, we don't have the right pricing signals for things like storage, we'll look and see that the Chinese do those things right, we do. which I would say.

In each of them, they will most likely do much better than us. You know they don't have elected electric rate boards that only look at a short-term restriction; They're actually looking at long-term needs, so we know they enable transmission lines 50 times faster than we do and you know if you look at all the innovation and transmission, we don't even have super high voltage transmission here, all that stuff. It is being done in Asia and all the teams that come. with that I think that when the US falls behind on something, it responds that this is unfortunate because we have so much IQ and entrepreneurial activity that it is a shame for us to fall behind, so I hope we don't have to use that mechanism.

I hope we use only pure. It makes sense to fix some of these things and some of them can happen at the regional level, the Rd core budget, although that has to happen at the federal level. I'm Dan Barstow from Turk, a nonprofit educational organization, and I guess I'm worried. about one of the resources that hasn't come up much in any of the discussions yet as we wait for problems that we have to solve for 30 50 years it won't be us, it will be the next generation and our schools are currently so focused on providing content knowledge that they can be regurgitated in an exam and not in developing the types of creativity and innovation we need.

Schools need fundamental change. I want to thank the Gates Foundation for everything they have done. to help schools change and maybe you can comment on your vision for how schools need to change to develop well the kind of skills we need, that's not a simple question, the bottom line and that's about 800 million a year in education in the US and most of that. It is about having a feedback system for teachers where they are observed and receive feedback on what the best teachers are doing and what they are not doing, so that the average quality of teaching increases measurably by doing so. . type of evaluation system so that it is not capricious so that it is very useful it is a difficult thing we have a lot of pilot districts where it is going very well you really have to be willing to fund an evaluation system for peers to come in and train those peers that It costs about two percent of payroll to do so, so there is a goal in evaluation to help people perform as well as very good teachers.

Very good teachers do an incredible job and all we have to do is move slightly in that direction and have a good educational system and the second thing is the use of technology and education, which is not a panacea, but it is use it in the right way to extend the school day, like personalized learning, having feedback, having the best teachers in the world, you know, we believe that there is a lot that can be asked there this last question here mr.

gates

my name is Mike Hart and I work with CR Energy and we haven't discussed much here today about what the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been doing in Africa, but we are big fans, we have a waste energy technology and it is small scale to village scale and before we came here for this meeting we had a meeting with our board of advisors and our board of directors and all of our employees, the Department of Defense, which is our sponsor on this, as well as looking at our railroad, which is our main owner and decided that we would like to offer as a donation to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation the use of our technology for free forever for the African continent.

We firmly believe in what you are doing and thinking. This could be a big help with what they're doing there, so we just wanted to offer it because we're so impressed with what they're doing there. I would love to discuss that the irony for the poor is that they pay more for energy. than anyone because if you can't have a reliable grid you're basically buying diesel fuel and using very inefficient generation technology and you know that's really holding back African countries, even those that are on the verge of doing well, Tanzania and Nigeria , Ethiopia. The energy sector is particularly because of the state wall that contains it, it's really a big limitation on positive economic developments there, so you know, but the foundation doesn't really do energy work, right?

This is a fabric. Did you personally know that yes, energy. that's for the world at large I'll do it on the private side if I make money it all goes to the foundation any energy solutions that are specifically targeted at the poor the foundation would do the foundation only has two things that we do. education and creating livelihoods for the poor and therefore a culture for the poorest, financial services for the poor, mainly health for the poor, is the most important thing we do, but if we saw a way that they could have access to energy, which means light at night. refrigeration vaccines, carbon fertilizers become cheaper if we saw a way to bring energy to them in a unique way, yes, then we would be interested, and you have to be very fast and very good because it is the last one and the load is very big. actually heavy, well, high bar, so bill, you talked about those two hundred crazy people that are necessary, you understand more than anyone on this planet about entrepreneurship and the willpower to do things, is something wrong?

What thoughts would you have of your own experience and experience? understanding of entrepreneurship to apply topeople, many of whom are in this room, about energy entrepreneurship to make the kind of changes you're talking about. The advances that are needed here are largely based on an understanding of science and engineering, so the current strength of American universities in those areas is a fantastic thing and if you look at the innovative energy portfolios, the node has the best, but there are also others, more than half of the truly surprising jobs are those that you know two hundred times five.

He knows two hundred in each of the directions of one or two, but he will succeed. The United States has a big part of that and therefore it allows them to raise capital, it allows them to expand their relationship with China, where if they have a breakthrough in the high growth market and they are not at a disadvantage due to trade problems between the US and China. We can create a framework that is very favorable for them. The returns for some of those people are because of EndNote technology coming back. The normal capitalist type of market works when you want to make systems related to energy generation or energy storage, we need to make sure that the rewards are there and it's not very clear at the moment what will be there if we look at the type of generation particularly network related. technologies, I mean there's no way for you to know something like tariffs, power, there's not a lot of nuclear startups because of time frame involvement, you have to think why don't we have more of that and you know what? that stops them.

There are people in the solar energy case, actually solar chemicals, that someone hasn't invested enough in, but there's a lot of good entrepreneurship, you know, sometimes you combine the US and manufacturing in the foreigner, which is not necessarily a bad thing, so you know, I would just encourage the people that I work in this area, the importance of this is that you know that you are at the top, the reason I dedicate time to it is because I believe which is very important for the environmental challenge and to help the poorest, you know that cheap energy is like a fantastic vaccine.

In terms of what it does for livelihoods, it's great that energy is a slightly more popular topic than it was 10 years ago, it's important that we maintain that trend, we need to look at scientific and engineering skills. the United States. relatively it continues to decline in that because that's where these smart entrepreneurial people come from. Thanks to Bill Gates for a great discussion.