Bill Gates has moved on from his Microsoft days, and seems to have committed to spending as much of his fortune as he can doing good before he dies. Clearly, he learned a thing or two from his time in Silicon Valley, quite possibly only after the US Department of Justice had some rather nasty things to say about his company’s work practices.

Gates’ latest spend is to double his investment in the research and development of renewable energy technology, bringing his tally up to a rather impressive $2 billion according to the Huffington Post. In South African terms, that’s just under R25 billion – enough to rescue Eskom at least once.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Gates said he’s trying to “bend the curve” on renewable technology research, and that he believes governments should put their weight and cash behind such projects like they did during the space race and World War II.

He also pointed out the limitations of current renewable solutions, like solar panels only generating energy during the day and when there’s no cloud cover, and wind turbines only doing their job when there’s wind. He said modern batteries are also insufficient to collect and store enough power to get people through a full day without recharging, and thus more investment is required.

All sentiments that we can get behind, sure, but it’s hard to square them with assertions by The Guardian that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the organisation from which all investment flows, still has a significant amount of its cash – $1.4bn – invested in fossil fuel companies.

Despite this and the Gates Foundation’s stance on climate change which some activists question – i.e. spend the next 15 years researching new solutions rather than deploying as many as possible right now – Gates’ move is a welcome one in the face of growing consensus that climate change is indeed a thing, and that energy sources based on fossil fuels are bad for people and the earth as a whole.

[Source – HuffPost, The Guardian, Image – CC-BY-2.0]