Partnerships are crucial in averting the climate crisis, and the Trump administration will soon have to end its animosity against other countries, says Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates.
Speaking at the Ecosperity Week 2025 Opening Dinner on May 5, Gates acknowledges a trend "where there's a little less cooperation going on", but adds that it is unlikely to be a "permanent thing". "I think we're going to - [in] the US - we're going to see how that works against us and come around on that, maybe not overnight."
Gates had earlier quipped about US President Donald Trump's hostile stance against Canada. In conversation with Singapore's ambassador for climate action Ravi Menon about cross-border electricity grid connectivity, Gates says: "In North America, we used to like the Canadians. I haven't asked the politicians if it's still okay to share electricity."
Gates jokingly adds: "When [electricity] comes in[to the US], are we going to have a tariff? It's a crazy world; we didn't know these Canadians were bad people."
Still, Gates says there is "a lot of commitment" to the climate cause in the US, with companies restating their climate pledges "even in a time of US government attention, and funding is being cut pretty significantly".
Singapore's energy options
See also: Singapore sets 2050 net-zero target, unveils national hydrogen strategy
Solar energy will eventually allow Singapore to meet about 10% of its projected electricity demand in 2050. In response to Menon's question about what Singapore can do to meet its energy demand, Gates says silicon solar panels today have an efficiency "in the high-20s". This refers to the percentage of sunlight a solar panel converts into usable electricity.
Even in the future, silicon solar panels will face a "practical limit" of 38% efficiency under full sunlight, Gates adds.
Instead, the next generation of solar panels could contain perovskite solar cells, says Gates. According to the US Department of Energy, perovskites are a family of materials that have shown potential for high performance and low production costs in solar cells. Perovskite cells are referred to as "thin-film" because they require much thinner active layers relative to crystalline silicon PV.
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The US Department of Energy says perovskite solar cells have shown "remarkable progress" in recent years with rapid increases in efficiency, from reports of about 3% in 2009 to over 26% today and nearly 34% under different configurations. However, perovskite photovoltaic solar cells are not yet manufactured at scale.
For Singapore to be fully self-sufficient in energy, the country will have to depend on progress on nuclear fission and fusion, says Gates, though these may only be viable in the latter half of the century. "These come in timeframes that make it very hard to get it all done by 2050. If things go well, that should be possible, but it's going to be close."
Singapore currently imports up to 100 megawatts (MW) of renewable energy from Laos through the Lao PDR-Thailand-Malaysia-Singapore Power Integration Project (LTMS-PIP), which began in June 2022. The second phase of the project, announced in September 2024, doubled this to a maximum of 200MW.
If the region decides to proceed further with grid interconnectivity plans, Gates recommends "superconducting wires" that can transmit electricity "two to three times" more than current technology.
Singapore also has a National Hydrogen Strategy, announced in 2022, which claims hydrogen could supply up to half of the country's power needs by 2050.
See also: Gates Foundation to set up S’pore office with EDB support
Hydrogen power, however, currently suffers from high costs. Gates says some firms are attempting to make geological hydrogen viable - "where you just stick a straw on the ground and there's a bunch of hydrogen that comes out, very much like the shale gas revolution".
US natural gas production rapidly increased after the shale gas revolution, or horizontal drilling and fracking techniques, came about in the 2000s. Critics, however, say the tracking process could contaminate groundwater.
Extracting geological hydrogen from the Earth's crust creates what is nicknamed white hydrogen, and Gates is "very hopeful" that this process could "drive the price of hydrogen down [to] under 50 cents a kilogramme".
The same budget
Rich countries owe it to the rest of the world to achieve net zero, says Gates. "Whether the entire world gets to zero - there are levels of emissions that are small enough that the temperature foreseen is actually not a problem... Rich countries must show that across all these different processes, there are solutions."
The Gates Foundation, which earlier in the day announced plans to set up an office in Singapore, is focused on global health and development. "Countries getting rich reduces a lot of pain," says Gates.
Gates' other focus is Breakthrough Energy, a group of firms he founded that invests in sustainable energy innovation and other emissions-reducing technologies.
The aim is to "innovate so well" that the climate crisis does not demand "very scarce resources in a disproportionate way, particularly [when] the budget is very short now", he adds. "It's a trade-off; are we going to buy enough vaccines for the world's children, or what climate-related things should we do? Those are coming out of the same budget."
Infographics: US DOE
