About MIT Energy Conference Transmission Panel

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. This panel will explore the challenges facing the expansion of transmission infrastructure to support the growing demand for new generation. The panel will compare what is happening now to what could and should be happening to enable new generation growth in areas without sufficient transmission infrastructure. The panel will discuss policy mechanisms that have been used to incentivize transmission infrastructure development in the past and discuss how innovative business strategies and partnerships can also play an important role. Finally, the panel will explore the role for entrepreneurs in this area and the potential for reemerging technologies such as High-Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) transmission to dramatically change how transmission infrastructure is planned, financed, constructed, and/or operated to facilitate generation capacity expansion efforts.