Friday, December 15, 2017

USA: Billionaires' Renewable Energy Fund Details Interest in Geothermal Energy Technologies


Details on the investment focus and talent driving Bill Gates’ big energy tech fund.


Two years after it was first unveiled, Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV) -- a billion dollar fund to finance breakthroughs in energy technology -- is finally pulling back curtain a little bit.

The final sector is (no surprise) another really difficult one. Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla is one of the few investors that has invested any money into new geothermal energy technologies.

AltaRock Energy, backed by Khosla, Kleiner Perkins, and others including Google.org, has been trying to develop next-gen geothermal technologies and has made some progress, but also struggled. At one point, Google.org was interested in geothermal tech, but that went by the wayside when they shut down their RE<C project.

BEV believes recent advances in drilling technology present interesting new opportunities for geothermal, however. "Techniques like horizontal drilling, multilateral drilling, extended reach drilling, complex path drilling, and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, all developed to extract fossil resources, offer interesting possibilities for geothermal energy," according to the website.


From the Global Geothermal News archives:
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