Bill Gates
Bill Gates
William Henry "Bill" Gates IIIis an American business magnate, entrepreneur, philanthropist, investor, and programmer. In 1975, Gates and Paul Allen co-founded Microsoft, which became the world's largest PC software company. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, CEO and chief software architect, and was the largest individual shareholder until May 2014. Gates has authored and co-authored several books...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth28 October 1955
CitySeattle, WA
CountryUnited States of America
availability wind requirements
Intermittency [in availability for wind and solar] changes the economics, particularly this requirement that the power company at all times be able to require power. That's large.
numbers tasks helping
More and more software would just increase the number of tasks that the computer would help solve.
people risk needs
We need to get a broader awareness. People say climate change is really bad, but painting that picture of what you're putting at risk.
government fundamentals research
Finally, assuming that many of those are fulfilled, which won't be easy in tight budget times, we're taking the supply side at the basic research level, because that's where government is absolutely fundamental.
years names innovation
On the supply side, for innovation, you'd say, go look at those R&D budgets, and they haven't moved far for years. In the case of the US - which is the majority of R&D funding across every category you can name: health, energy, whatever - it's been about $5 billion a year from the Department of Energy.
government office long
The government's ability to select scientists and pick things that are fairly strange, because politicians don't like failures. They're only in office a short term, and many of these things take a long time.
years gone credit
So on the demand side [for energy], there have been a variety of policies that globally have been way over $50 billion a year of tax credits, raising the price of electricity through things like renewable portfolio standards, so the total amount of money that's gone into sending a price signal to push up demand versus what would happen without it has been gigantic.
style netherlands able
Now, if you're rich, you can spend a lot of money, Netherlands-style, and reduce that. But Bangladesh or parts of India, like Calcutta, they just simply won't be able to afford that kind of protection.
country mean japan
Anyway, the US, as in most issues, is the best, has the best capability to lead, and really needs to lead. It doesn't [mean] that other countries won't pick different tacks and emphasize different things. In aggregate, they're almost half of the energy R&D. Europe, China, Japan - it's very important that they come along and contribute to these things.
long different nuclear
There was a concept a long time ago that you would do a different type of reactor called a "fast reactor," that would make a bunch of another element called plutonium, and then you would pull that out, and then you would burn that. That's called "breeding" in a fast reactor. That is bad because plutonium is nuclear weapons material. It's messy. The processing you have to get through is not only environmentally difficultly, it's extremely expensive.
different cases difficult
Software is different than other products um, partly because it's, it's not physical and, and partly because of its complexity. You can express in software millions of different cases and making sure that you handle all of them correctly is extremely difficult.
heat kind environment
Sorghum is kind of unusual. It can go to very high heats, but it's not as productive in most environments as maize is.
kids weather variables
The first big effects will be farmers that live on the edge. Today's weather, they barely get by. Their kids, a high percentage are malnourished, and so if you impose more variable weather and more heat, you're getting more floods, more droughts, and during the germination time, the high heat, most crops...do poorly when there's more heat.
country rich-countries japan
The world is very disparate, in terms of the US using the most energy per person, and then the other rich countries - Europe, Japan, New Zealand - using about half of what we do, and then the world average being about a fifth of what we use, with China just now surpassing the world average.