Bill Gates’ Climate Outfit Is Now Among the Top Green Grantmakers. What’s It Funding?

Editor's Note: This article was originally published on August 2, 2023.

Bill Gates’ investment and advocacy platform Breakthrough Energy became one of the country’s top green grantmakers in 2021, its first full year making grants, moving more than $94 million through two nonprofits, according to recently released tax filings. That’s about as much as the Walton Family Foundation’s long-running environmental program gave out that year.

The two nonprofits mostly backed Washington, D.C.-based policy work in their inaugural grantmaking. Breakthrough Energy Foundation, a 501(c)(3), made nearly two-thirds of the grants, with its largest awards going to think tanks, networks and associations operating in the nation’s capital, as well as making a major grant to the government-philanthropic coalition to stop methane emissions. The rest went through Breakthrough Energy Action, a 501(c)(4) group, to other action funds, mostly at major green groups and D.C. policy shops.

The groups, along with a third registered nonprofit that did not make any grants in 2021, are just a few of the many investment and funding arms under the Breakthrough Energy umbrella, a network of outfits created by Gates to accelerate and scale climate innovations and reduce what he calls the “green premium” — or higher price for climate-friendly technology. Measured by dollars, its various investment funds are by far the main show, with almost $2.4 billion publicly committed. Yet it also has a significant fellowship program and now rivals top philanthropies in its grantmaking. Heck, it even has a media outlet, Cipher.

Breakthrough Energy has an extensive website outlining its investment portfolio and programmatic goals — focusing on manufacturing, electricity, agriculture, transportation and buildings. For now, however, it offers almost no information on grantmaking programs or grantees other than its fellowship program. So these initial grants offer an important first look into how Breakthrough is using philanthropy to drive the innovations it hopes to advance.

“We set our strategy based on where we see opportunities to drive progress,” said a Breakthrough Energy spokesperson in an emailed statement, noting the passage of the historic climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act and other major bills that included climate spending. “Congress had a historic window to pass significant federal climate legislation and so we prioritized our policy work and funding accordingly.”

This first wave of grantmaking on record reflects an engagement in politics that we hadn’t seen much of in Gates’ past climate work, as the 67-year-old has tended to prefer backing technology and infrastructure building. That said, we don’t actually know how much of the groups’ money is coming from Gates himself and how much is coming from other donors. All three are set up as public charities, which are not required to disclose their donors. They are structured this way to make it easy for donors other than Gates to contribute to them, according to the spokesperson.

Even more money has gone out the door since 2021. Breakthrough announced two big grants from Breakthrough Energy Catalyst Foundation, the previously inactive third nonprofit, over the past year and a half. And the three groups ended 2021 with a combined $408 million in net assets, positioning them to continue to play a major role in philanthropy’s efforts to advance clean energy technologies and implement federal climate legislation in the years ahead.

The truckloads of cash passing through these Breakthrough nonprofits is the latest example of the way billionaire donors are shaping climate and environmental philanthropy, sometimes overnight. Similar to the Bezos Earth Fund or Laurene Powell Jobs’ Waverley Street Foundation, these three nonprofits’ grantmaking went from zero to Walton-sized in their first full year, and may have already grown further in the year and a half since.

The influx of funding is a welcome shift in the climate movement after years of paltry support, and offers a major boost at a time when billions in federal funding are becoming available to communities nationwide. Yet the lack of real-time transparency makes it hard for anyone but insiders to know where Breakthrough’s philanthropic funding is going until years after the fact — and the structures obscure who is actually donating. What we can determine, thanks to tax filings, is who were among the first round of beneficiaries of this new green grantmaking giant.

Where is the money going?

Breakthrough Energy Foundation, the largest of the nonprofits, made roughly $60 million in grants in 2021. More than a third went to just two organizations, with the largest check ($15 million) going to the multipartner Methane Hub via its fiscal sponsor, the Windward Fund. The second biggest ($10 million) went to climate philanthropy veteran Hal Harvey’s Climate Imperative, a policy shop and regrantor, for “industrial decarbonization.”

Other top awards were comparatively much smaller. Several Washington, D.C.-area groups working on science, energy and policy received funding, including the Clean Energy Buyers Association ($2.7 million), Americans for a Clean Energy Grid ($1.5 million), Federation of American Scientists ($1.5 million) and Bipartisan Policy Center ($1.3 million).

Of the gifts that went outside of the nation’s capital, significant grants went to Minneapolis-based Great Plains Institute ($1.8 million); MetPeel, a company of a Breakthrough Energy fellow working on steel manufacturing ($1.6 million) and New York-based Consumer Reports ($1.5 million). Another $10 million went to grantmaking in Europe, according to its tax filing, but recipients were not listed.

“Our strategies will evolve as the opportunities do,” said the spokesperson. “There are great organizations moving important climate work forward at the local and regional levels, as well. We’ve already supported several and we’ll continue to look for opportunities to engage with them, just as we’re engaged at the national level, in the months and years to come.”

It’s quite likely that many more grants have gone out the door. Breakthrough Energy Foundation had $254 million in net assets at the end of 2021, and may have added still more funding, especially given what we know about Bill Gates’ prolific fundraising.

We also know about more recent activity from one of the three nonprofits, Breakthrough Energy Catalyst Foundation, which was set up to provide funding for Breakthrough’s accelerator for emerging climate technologies. The group had not disbursed any funds as of its 2021 tax filing, but in the last year, announced two grants that give a window into its priorities. One was a $50 million award to a sustainable aviation fuel plant set up by LanzaJet, while another was $20 million in funding for two iron-air battery systems that use a reversible rusting process to store energy.

What is the Action Fund supporting?

Breakthrough Energy Action is a 501(c)(4), meaning it has greater latitude to support lobbying and political activity. The fund’s largest grant on record went to a coalition of the kinds of groups you might expect from Gates and company, but with some advisors you might not. The nonprofit sent $11 million — a third of its 2021 funding — to Climate Power, a Sacramento-based group founded by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, League of Conservation Voters and Sierra Club.

Those groups are used to such mega awards, but its advisory board includes members who seem less likely to be on the receiving end of a Gates-related grant, such as environmental justice activists like Sunrise Executive Director Varshini Prakash and Green New Deal author Rhiana Gunn-Wright, as well as the heads of organizations like United We Dream and the Working Families Party. Gates has been known to dismiss the impact of climate activism in the past. The board has too many well-known names to list, including former Department of Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and climate scientist Michael Mann.

The action fund’s other major grants were more similar to its nonpolitical funding. Big checks were cut to the League of Conservation Voters ($5.5 million), Building Back Together ($4 million) and the Environmental Defense Action Fund ($2.9 million). Grants of $1 million-plus went to multiple moderate environmental groups across the center-left and center-right, such as Bipartisan Policy Center Action, BlueGreen Alliance, Clearpath, The Nature Conservancy and Third Way. Action funds of other major green groups — EDF, NRDC, NFWF, National Audubon Society — received six-figure checks.

More likely went out last year. Like its 501(c)(3) counterparts, the action fund had money left over, with about $57 million in net assets at the end of 2021.

How do these groups fit with Gates’ other giving and climate philanthropy overall?

The Microsoft cofounder is best known for his health and education funding, but he’s long been a major environmental funder, albeit with a very particular focus. By my count, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was the seconnd-largest green grantmaker in the United States in 2021, largely due to its agricultural development program.

These new nonprofits not only pursue a different set of goals, but represent a notable geographic shift. Breakthrough sent nearly all of its grant checks to U.S. recipients in 2021, whereas the Gates Foundation’s environment-related support went all but entirely to international causes, whether carried out by U.S.-based organizations or foreign ones.

Judging from its leadership, Gates is also taking a less active role in these groups. While he and Melinda French Gates dominated the board of the Gates Foundation for most of its existence, Bill Gates is not a trustee of any of these organizations.

Breakthrough Energy Foundation and the Action Fund currently share the same two trustees: Rodi Guidero, who became executive director of Breakthrough last summer, and Greg Nelson, an independent board member who is on advisory boards for Civic Nation and Higher Ground Labs. The board of Breakthrough Energy Catalyst Foundation, meanwhile, is made up of Nelson and two other independent trustees, Jeannine Sargent, a venture capitalist, and Rich Hossfeld, co-CEO of SoftBank Group’s energy arm, SB Energy.

Aside from representing a different approach for Gates, Breakthrough Energy is different than almost any organization covered by Inside Philanthropy. Its branches share a mission and work in unison to achieve it, but the network’s venture investments far outweigh its grantmaking. In fact, for years, Breakthrough was effectively just a VC fund for climate tech. With its other arms now pulling additional levers, it’s now more of a conglomerate mixing investment, corporate backing, in-house policy work, philanthropy, fellowships and media. It’s hard from the outside even to get a handle on all these activities and funding streams.

At first glance, that approach is similar to a long-term trend in high-dollar philanthropy, driven by donors like Mike Bloomberg and Pierre Omidyar, in which several legal structures are leveraged in order to maximize the power they can exert. Younger billionaires, like Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Lukas Walton have also embraced forms of this model.

Gates might be seen as the next generation of those efforts. Yet unlike those operations, which are basically family offices with a social mission, he has brought in outside investors. He’s also opted for secrecy, choosing nonprofit structures that need not reveal their donors, over that of a foundation.

It’s encouraging on one level that such a powerhouse is focusing on climate change. The organization is trying to take the leaps forward needed to electrify and transform our world, such as carbon-free steel and cement. At the same time, it is prioritizing technologies some would like to see left behind, like nuclear power. And watching this enormous funding machine get up and running is another reminder of the outsized influence billionaires are exerting on the unprecedented energy transition that is underway.

Correction: Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan support the Breakthrough Energy Fellows program. An earlier version of this article incorrectly listed them as supporters of Breakthrough Energy Catalyst.

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