HOUSTON – While acknowledging that ‘energy transition’ is a wildering cycle path to navigate, billionaire and Microsoft founder Bill Gates is staying the course on his ‘mega bet’ that nuclear fusion will eventually define the planet’s energy future.

In the recently concluded CERAWeek conference here, Gates highlighted that “in the long run, nuclear fusion will be – almost certainly – the primary source of electricity on the planet.”

Billionaire and Microsoft founder Bill Gates in a luncheon dialogue with S&P Global Vice Chairman Daniel Yergin at CERAWeek 2024.

Breakthrough Energy, a company founded by Gates, is among the big-ticket investors for pioneering ventures on the development of nuclear fusion technology – and he is in that roll along with other billionaires like Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Richard Branson of the Virgin group.

Nuclear fusion is well-envisioned by its advocates and pioneers like Gates, as the supreme ‘energy solution’ of the future – and one that underpins global energy transition which will align global climate goals with the Paris Agreement.

Gates contended that the transition to a low carbon energy future has been much more difficult than any other thing that he has worked on before, as he had also blown the lid off that in real terms, the world is still “living in a hydrocarbon-driven economy.”

While nuclear fusion may still be several decades away, that technological innovation once success is achieved, is widely perceived as the eventual ‘holy grail’ of clean energy.

As envisioned, nuclear fusion which will lean on a technology that will crack hydrogen atoms into helium akin to a process applied in powering the sun, is highly deemed as a carbon-free solution and it is not also prone to meltdown and will have less impact on the sphere of radioactive wastes if compared to nuclear fission which is the current process of powering nuclear reactors.

Apart from his relentless faith on the game-changing potential of nuclear fusion, Gates qualified that wider array of innovations are exceptionally needed for the world to successfully cross the energy transition maze.

“As energy demand increase with technological advances such as AI (artificial intelligence), the evolution of the energy sector becomes increasingly complex,” he said, adding that “our journey towards a sustainable future with low carbon emissions is becoming more and more complicated.”

At this stage, he emphasized that “the energy transition is very, very difficult path,” and that the pace of transformation being advanced in the energy world may still not be enough to tame global temperature within the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit in the Paris climate pact.

While citing that mammoth global corporations – including those in the oil and gas sector – have already mapped out accelerated shift to cleaner technologies, Gates noted “it is likely that the most ambitious objectives have not yet been achieved, which is to limit warming to 1.5 to 2.0 degrees.”

Beyond massive-scale deployments of intermittent renewable energy (RE) technologies, he specified that carbon management and innovations – including carbon capture and storage (CCS), would be part of the crucial journey to a sustainable and low carbon future.

Further, he reckoned that the ultimate defining parameter that must be gainfully hurdled in the energy transition is ensuring that the price of electricity would be affordable to the consumers.