Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation, toured the Frascati, Italy labs of ENEA (the Italian
National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic
Development) on November 12. ENEA reported that “Gates is interested
in getting deeper knowledge of the activities of frontier research”
and “researchers had the chance to give insight into the Agency’s
advanced research activities.”
As part of the tour, Gates was briefed on cold fusion developments by
Dr. Vittorio Violante, a cold fusion scientist who has been at ENEA
since his graduate fellowship in 1980. Since 2011, Violante has led
the ENEA Task Force for Energy from Metal Hydrogen Systems.
Gates has written about energy on his online blog. While his focus is
bringing energy to the world’s poor, his essay “We Need Energy
Miracles” (June 25, 2014) focuses more broadly on the need for clean
energy. He writes that global climate changes impacted by energy production have brought on an immediate need for the world’s energy
sources “to be clean, as well as reliable and affordable.” Though he
does not mention LENR as a viable clean energy source, one can hope
that the “and more” caveat to his list may soon include cold fusion
technologies. Of the lack of funding for clean energy, Gates notes, “Just like vaccines, clean-energy miracles don’t just happen by
chance. We have to make them happen, through long-term investments in
research and development. Unfortunately, right now neither the private sector nor the U.S. government is making anywhere near the scale of
investment it takes to produce these breakthroughs.” Gates recognizes
that there is a “long lag time—often decades—before an investment in
energy research delivers a commercial payoff (if it ever does).” This
realistic thinking about the nature of research is reassuring.
Gates is a member of the American Energy Innovation Council, which is
working to “foster strong economic growth, create jobs in new
industries, and reestablish America’s energy technology leadership
through robust, public and private investments in the development of
clean energy technologies.” The Council is a project of the Bipartisan Policy Center. All of these goals align perfectly with the anticipated
impact of cold fusion technology.
Gates was invited to attend ICCF19 (the 19th cold fusion conference)
by Conference Chair Antonio La Gatta. The meeting will take place in Padua, Italy in mid-April.
Pictured: Bill Gates and Vittorio Violante at ENEA
