Bill Gates Calls For "Energy Miracles" - i.e. Increasing Battery Capacity 100-Fold

[hatrack]

Long Beach, California (CNN) -- Microsoft Corp. founder and philanthropist Bill Gates on Friday called on the world's tech community to find a way to turn spent nuclear fuel into cheap, clean energy. "What we're going to have to do at a global scale is create a new system," Gates said in a speech at the TED Conference in Long Beach, California. "So we need energy miracles."

Gates called climate change the world's most vexing problem, and added that finding a cheap and clean energy source is more important than creating new vaccines and improving farming techniques, causes into which he has invested billion of dollars. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation last month pledged $10 billion to help deploy and develop vaccines for children in the developing world.

The world must eliminate all of its carbon emissions and cut energy costs in half in order to prevent a climate catastrophe, which will hit the world's poor hardest, he said. "We have to drive full speed and get a miracle in a pretty tight timeline," he said.

EDIT

Gates also called for innovation in battery technology. "All the batteries we make now could store less than 10 minutes of all the energy ," he said. "So, in fact, we need a big breakthrough here. Something that's going to be of a factor of 100 better than what we have now." Gates called for more investment in climate-related technology. He said he is backing a company called TerraPower, which is working on an alternate form of nuclear technology that uses spent fuel.

EDIT

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/02/12/bill.gates.clean.energy/index.html?hpt=T2

[Turbineguy]

1. Oh noes!

He's joined the woolly thinkers. Everybody knows climate change is a hoax.

[panader0]

2. He'll be in ExxonMobile's crosshairs now

[GliderGuider]

3. Two orders of magnitude. And we need it a week from this Friday?

I'll get right on that, boss. All I have to do is make this nifty Gantt chart, assign some resources, set some milestones, do a critical path analysis, and hey presto.

Or maybe this is just Big Bill's way of saying, "We're hooped, aren't we?"

[eppur_se_muova]

4. Sorry. Batteries must obey the laws of physics and chemistry.

Pretty harsh upper bound on what batteries can store.

Mr. Microsoft doesn't want to be outclassed by Google? Too late.

[eppur_se_muova]

5. More on TerraPower's "traveling wave" reactor in MIT's Technology Review:

http://technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=specialsections&sc=tr10&id=22114

[FBaggins]

6. FBaggins calls for cars that run on water.

If only "calling for" made any difference.

[eppur_se_muova]

7. Glendower: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

Hotspur: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?

--- William Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 1, Act 3, Scene 1