If the world wants solutions to its most intractable problems — getting enough food, water and fuel for 9 billion people, for example — entrepreneurs must be able to try out big ideas. And fail sometimes. Read more »
Entrepreneur Russ Wilcox, who is the former CEO and co-founder of display-maker E Ink, has just joined next-gen nuclear startup Transatomic Power as its CEO. There’s only a handful of web and computing entrepreneurs that go nuclear. Read more »
We need “energy miracles,” in at least five areas, and in each of these areas “we need at least two hundred crazy people who think their idea alone can solve this,” said Bill Gates at the Wall Street Journal’s Eco:nomics conference on Thursday night. Read more »
Bill Gates says the nuclear startup TerraPower that he has backed is in preliminary discussions with the Chinese government, as well as the governments of Russia, India and other countries, too. TerraPower will most likely commercialize its tech outside the U.S. first. Read more »
Making energy from poop can be a good profit-making and social enterprise. That’s the aim of a research project at Columbia University, where a professor is getting a $1.5 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop a waste-to-energy technology. Read more »
Bill Gates has positioned himself as a champion of energy innovation to solve climate change problems. Still, he’s surprised by how tough it is to get political support for boosting R&D spending and wondered if “perhaps we are not patient enough.” Read more »
Researchers are already predicting how the nuclear disaster in Japan will affect the nuclear industry. According to Mark Cooper, a senior fellow at Vermont Law School’s Institute for Energy and Environment, construction costs of nuclear reactors are likely to soar for awhile. Read more »
The year in greentech was influenced by a whole grip of startups, investors, innovators, and policy makers. But when it comes to page views, there were a couple of companies that dominated: Bloom Energy, and Bill Gate’s TerraPower. Here are the Top 10 stories of 2010: Read more »
In the second quarter of 2010, greentech startups scored record venture capital and increased spending despite a weak economy. Solar power retained its lead in greentech venture financing, while global investment for clean energy asset financing fell. China, meanwhile, underscored its rising might in the greentech industry, raising billions of dollars in green energy financing. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Bill Gates might be the most prominent high-level Microsoft exec to focus on energy innovation, but he’s certainly not the first. A decade ago its then-chief technology officer, Nathan Myhrvold, left the software giant to found Intellectual Ventures, which has spun off nuclear power startup TerraPower. Read more »
