Conventional generation facilities are becoming increasingly difficult to site near heavily populated areas and the most promising renewable energy resources such as wind and solar thermal are typically found far from the large cities they are meant to serve. Where there is the potential to build new generation, the power transmission network is typically inadequate to accommodate significant new sources. The subsequent need to couple new generation with new long-distance transmission leads to a classic "chicken and egg" problem: developers seeking to build additional generation capacity hesitate to build without transmission infrastructure while transmission planners lack the incentive to build transmission lines to areas with little generation.
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