10 December 2015, Paris – In order to accelerate widespread clean energy innovation, 20 national governments have announced a partnership with the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a cluster of influential CEOs and investors committed to funding breakthrough, transformative clean technologies.
As part of a drive to make clean energy more widely affordable, a group of like-minded countries including the US, China and India, announced the launch of Mission Innovation at the outset of the COP21 in Paris. The subsequent partnership with the Breakthrough Energy Coalition reflects the need for public-private cooperation: government research must be supplemented with private sector skills and investment to drive innovation from lab to marketplace.
Within Mission Innovation, each participating country has committed to significantly increase its public research pipeline by doubling governmental investment in clean energy research and development over the next 5 years. Emphasis will be placed on basic and applied research aimed at delivering transformative technologies.
The Breakthrough Energy Coalition promises to provide early-stage finance to novel technologies, to fill the ‘capital gap’ which prevents ideas reaching commercialisation. The coalition pledges to be ‘a different kind of private investor’, with a long term commitment to put patient, flexible risk capital to work, motivated by the criticality of an energy transition.