Bill Gates, author of ‘How to Avoid a Climate Disaster’, joins Yahoo Finance’s Andy Serwer to discuss the freezing temperatures hitting the state of Texas.
Video Transcript
ANDY SERWER: Hello, everyone. I’m Andy Serwer. And welcome to a Yahoo Finance special, Climate Crisis. I’m joined now by Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, former CEO of Microsoft, and author of the new book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.” Bill, welcome.
BILL GATES: Yeah– great to be with you.
ANDY SERWER: So I want to start off by asking you about the weather. And right now, the US is experiencing a massive, highly unusual deep freeze. Is this due to climate change, do you think?
BILL GATES: Well, these events become more likely because of climate change because the normal wind patterns are broken down. And so a cold front can go further south more often than we would expect. So yeah, the extreme events are coming more often and with more force, including hurricanes, than before we started warming the earth.
ANDY SERWER: This recent storm has caused massive power outages in Texas. And the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, blamed frozen wind turbines and said it shows the Green New Deal would “be a deadly deal for the United States.” How would you respond to that, Bill?
BILL GATES: Well, in terms of the current situation, you know, he’s actually wrong. The wind turbines– you can make sure they can deal with the cold. It probably wasn’t anticipated for the wind turbines that far south. But, you know, the ones up in Iowa and North Dakota are– do have the ability to not freeze up.
Actually, the main capacity that’s gone out in Texas is not the wind. It’s actually some of the natural gas plants that were also not ready for these super cord temperatures. So even though, you know, viewing this as an attack on renewable energies, in this case, is wrong, in fact, the point he’s making, which is that as you rely more and more on wind and solar, that reliability will be a challenge and you need– you’ll need three things to maintain reliability while driving renewables over 80%–
One is more transmission. So we have an open source model. We’re going to show that if Texas had had slightly more on a connection, they wouldn’t have had a problem.
The second its energy storage– still hard to store these amounts of energy. And finally, sources of energy that aren’t weather-dependent, but are green, like nuclear– and so those three will be an important part of the zero-emission electricity system.
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