Bill Gates Quotes

With a giant battery, we'd be able to address the problem of intermittency that prevents wind and solar from contributing to the grid in the same way that coal and gas and nuclear do today.

If you had a really good - battery, it wouldn't matter that the sun goes down at night and the wind stops blowing sometimes. But at the moment, battery technology is nowhere near good enough to use at utility scale.

There's a limit to how much you can deploy renewables, like wind or solar. People will talk about getting up to 30 percent of America's power from renewables, but you can't get to 100 percent because of their unreliability.

On the path to a low-carbon, clean-energy future, we need cleaner, non-intermittent sources of power that will allow us to keep the lights on when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining.

I think the likelihood that combustion will continue to represent the large portion of the power unit world is very small.

We've been having a lot of hearings lately about the reliability of the grid and the need for more distributive generation. We can be a leader of that here in Connecticut.

Large conventional power plants will continue to be built, but their significance for energy supply is diminishing.

I can't inject renewables into a grid that doesn't have base load.

The wind and the sun are free.

People are are moving away from the fossil fuel-based economy, to a more renewable economy. That is what is called the 'transition town' movement. There are three hundred towns in Britain that are making this transition. Taking energy from solar power, from wind power, from water power.

The fuel in the earth will be exhausted in a thousand or more years, and its mineral wealth, but man will find substitutes for these in the winds, the waves, the sun's heat, and so forth.

Variable but forecastable renewables (wind and solar cells) are very reliable when integrated with each other, existing supplies and demand. For example, three German states were more than 30 percent wind-powered in 2007 - and more than 100 percent in some months. Mostly renewable power generally needs less backup than utilities already bought to combat big coal and nuclear plants' intermittence.

The laws of supply and demand drive up the price, inevitably, over time. But solar and wind are abundant and renewable resources.

I think the world on the other side of fossil fuel is more local - the logic of sun and wind is diffuse and spread out, not concentrated like the logic of coal and oil.

The most straightforward path would be if we could bring the cost of solar electric and wind down by another factor of say, three, and then have some miraculous storage solution, so that not only over the 24-hour day but over long periods of time where the wind doesn't blow, you have reliable energy. That's a path. But energy storage is hard. That's not a guaranteed path.

I just feel like making things solar-powered and wind-powered should be as easy as using an iPad.

The potential for alternative energy sources, mainly solar and wind power, to completely replace coal and gas for utility generation globally is, I think, certain. The question is only whether it takes 30 years or 70 years.

Everything will be solar in 30 years.

Our nation is well equipped to make the transition. We have an abundance of natural resources like wind, natural gas, solar and geothermal.

To build a power plant and run lines to houses, to huts, to anything is a tremendous amount of work...how about...just giving them the service where they need it-on the roof of their hut.

The main problem with solar on the Earth's surface is that it is so intermittent, and we don't have decent storage yet.

Every three weeks, we bring online as much solar power as we did in all of 2008...That’s why, over the past six years, we’ve done more than ever before to combat climate change, from the way we produce energy, to the way we use it.

Wind and solar power, energy efficient buildings, cars that go farther on a tank of gas, and other solutions can fight climate change. I know America can get on a more sustainable path - we just have to raise our voices and demand it.

We couldn't go to the moon on whale oil. We don't have the capacity yet to consider doing such things as harnessing current sunlight. We're burning ancient sunlight in order to get us to where we now are. But it's costly.

Once the renewable infrastructure is built, the fuel is free forever. Unlike carbon-based fuels, the wind and the sun and the earth itself provide fuel that is free, in amounts that are effectively limitless.