At the Paris climate conference today, the U.S. and 19 other countries agreed to double their respective research-and-development investments for clean energy over a five-year period.
The participating countries, which include China, India and Saudi Arabia, aim to boost global energy innovation by making clean energy affordable on a wide scale as part of a program called Mission Innovation.
“Accelerating clean energy innovation is essential to achieving the goal of limiting the rise in global temperatures to below 2˚C,” the White House said in a fact sheet. “While significant progress has been made in cost reduction and deployment of clean energy technologies, the pace of innovation and the scale of transformation is falling far short of what is required.”
The funding initiative was announced alongside a new coalition launched by Bill Gates and other private investors whose goal is to take “the risks that allow the early stage energy companies that emerge from the research programs of Mission Innovation countries to come out of the lab and into the marketplace.”
