tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/218923180 2008-05-15 11:10:39 -0400 MIT Energy Conference Today half of US electric generation comes from coal-fired power plants, and business-as-usual forecasts show that by 2030, our coal-fired capacity may increase by as much as 120 GW, with tremendous impacts on US carbon dioxide emissions. Carbon capture and sequestration technology promises a method of decoupling CO2 emissions from fossil fuel power production. However, the first at-scale demonstration plant with capture and storage at the same site, the FutureGen project, has recently lost the backing of the US Department of Energy. Also in the past year, several other proposed at-scale demonstration projects have been cancelled or postponed. As panel moderator Howard Herzog recently said in the Wall Street Journal: <em>“How can we do hundreds of these plants by 2050 — and that’s what we’ll need — if we can’t even do one?”</em> 3635 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/218890820 2008-05-15 11:06:19 -0400 MIT Energy Conference This panel explores the challenges facing the expansion of transmission infrastructure to support the growing demand for new generation, focusing on new generation growth in areas without sufficient transmission infrastructure. The panel discusses policy mechanisms that have been used to incentivize transmission infrastructure development in the past and how innovative business strategies and partnerships can also play an important role. Finally, the panel explores 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. 3682 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/218864700 2008-05-15 11:00:00 -0400 MIT Energy Conference Nuclear power has a quiet and impressive recent history: nuclear plants supply 20% of U.S. electricity, have achieved industry-wide capacity factors greater than 90%, and have operated safely and inexpensively over the last decades. Despite this record-breaking performance, no new U.S. plants have been built in the last 30 years, and nuclear building infrastructure has atrophied. Incentives in the 2005 Energy Policy Act aim to re-start the American nuclear industry. These operate by authorizing loan guarantees and tax credits for the first 6,000 MWe of nuclear power (or about six plants) built in the United States. But what about future nuclear stations – will plant “Lucky Number 7” be built? Many utilities and reactor vendors are bullish about nuclear prospects, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission expects to receive about 14 license applications in 2008. None of the utilities, however, has yet firmly committed to building a plant. This panel will discuss the likelihood of financing, constructing, and operating new nuclear power stations. The finance challenge is daunting, as nuclear plant investments are particularly capital-intensive and construction costs in all sectors are skyrocketing. Further compounding the situation are delays in opening a spent fuel repository and other waste management issues. Bottlenecks in the supply chain and the aging nuclear work force represent two more hurdles. Nevertheless, nuclear power is the strongest candidate for immediately viable, carbon-free baseload electricity. Representatives from nuclear vendors, utilities, and the finance community explain why, and also highlight some of the challenges facing nuclear. Balancing the difficulties against numerous drivers, the panel offers insight into what we can expect from the nuclear fleet’s next generation. 3633 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/218828620 2008-05-15 11:04:27 -0400 MIT Energy Conference While US geothermal electric capacity stands at only 2544 MWe, there are over 2500 MWe of conventional geothermal projects currently being developed in the United States, and that number could more than double by 2015. Despite this growth, conventional geothermal energy is limited in its ability to scale due to its dependence on the presence of a natural hydrothermal resource to exploit. Engineered Geothermal Systems (EGS) are artificially created geothermal systems made by hydraulically stimulating a rock formation to create a network of interconnected wells and then circulating fluid through the system. Since EGS can theoretically be developed wherever there is a high temperature rock formation, the resource base is huge. EGS holds the potential for large scale, baseload, renewable energy. However, the technology is still in the early stages of development and deployment. For EGS to achieve significant scale, there must be advancement in technologies such as drilling and reservoir stimulation, in addition to demonstration projects and consistent policy support. Since the first EGS fields will be developed on the edges of conventional hydrothermal fields and will utilize many of the same technologies as conventional geothermal plants, conventional geothermal development is critical to the future of EGS as it establishes the infrastructure, industry and knowledge base needed to harness the EGS resource. Geothermal energy has the potential to play a significant role in the US energy mix, but could also remain a relatively unknown bit player if not properly developed. This panel highlights some of the recent developments in unlocking the potential of the EGS resource while discussing key challenges and opportunities going forward. 3650 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/218802860 2008-05-15 11:09:00 -0400 MIT Energy Conference This panel explores the barriers that have prevented the widespread adoption of demonstrated efficiency improvement strategies – including policy distortions, lack of transparency in energy usage and pricing, information gaps, agency issues, financial constraints, and other market inefficiencies. Also discussed are innovations in policy, technology, and business to optimize end-use energy efficiency as a resource. 3626 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/218777460 2008-05-15 10:57:14 -0400 MIT Energy Conference The growing scientific consensus is that we have perhaps forty years to reduce drastically our GHG emissions below current levels to avoid catastrophic consequences. In the meantime, conventional wisdom has it that firm power services will continue to be supplied to the world's power grids predominantly by coal (eventually with carbon capture and sequestration), nuclear and large hydro (and to a lesser extent by natural gas) for decades to come, with non-hydro renewables growing exponentially over that period but continuing to play the marginal, non-firm role they've played almost exclusively to date. Yet nuclear and large hydro face significant environmental, logistical, financial and political hurdles; carbon capture and sequestration technologies are years from commercialization, will be costly, and don't address concerns with supply-chain environmental impacts; and natural gas cannot continue to fill the gap indefinitely. As a result, there are significant risks to relying on these “conventional” approaches to close the massive gap left by the current renewable energy paradigm. In short, there is an increasingly urgent need to change the renewable energy paradigm – to identify renewable, low-carbon technologies that are scalable, firm, dispatchable and commercially viable on a stand-alone basis within the next five to ten years, able to compete with coal and nuclear not only in the U.S. and Europe but in India, China and elsewhere. Are there potential solutions in view, and if so, why are they not receiving more attention and financial support from the mainstream energy policy and planning community? 3353 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/218751980 2008-05-15 10:53:30 -0400 MIT Energy Conference An entrepreneurial, dot-com approach is often proposed as being capable of solving the many issues, particularly greenhouse-gas emissions, demand growth, and supply limitations, facing the energy sector. However, the dot-com and the clean-tech environments are quite different. While the internet boom created a new industry in a vacuum, clean technologies must compete against the largest industry in the world, and must do so at the low costs associated with today's energy choices.?The challenge in the energy sector is to provide scalable energy that is cheap, available in abundance and has minimal environmental implications. Today, much research and innovation is focused on marginal improvements in the existing industry. However, a need exists for disruptive changes to address these challenges facing society. ?This panel discusses the innovation-to-commercialization process in energy, the fundamental differences for entrepreneurs in energy compared to other industries, the need for scale, and the requirement for disruptive technologies. The success strategy for startups, research labs, and existing industry is also compared. Further, the session explores the innovation and entrepreneurship solutions to the challenges, and whether enough is being done to fill the innovation-to-commercialization pipeline. 3429 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/218726460 2008-05-15 11:12:25 -0400 MIT Energy Conference Jim Rogers is chairman of the board, president and chief executive officer of Duke Energy. He was named chairman in January 2007, following the separation of Duke Energy’s natural gas businesses into a new publicly traded company, Spectra Energy. Rogers has more than 18 years of experience as a chief executive officer in the electric utility industry. He was named president and chief executive officer of Duke Energy following the merger of Duke Energy and Cinergy in April 2006. Before the merger, Rogers served as Cinergy’s chairman and chief executive officer for more than 11 years. Prior to the formation of Cinergy, he joined PSI Energy in 1988 as the company’s chairman, president and chief executive officer. He served as executive vice president of interstate pipelines for the Enron Gas Pipeline Group before joining PSI. Before joining the Enron Corp., Rogers was a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld. Before joining that firm, Rogers was deputy general counsel for litigation and enforcement for the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). Previously, Rogers served as assistant to the chief trial counsel at FERC, as a law clerk for the Supreme Court of Kentucky, and as assistant attorney general for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, where he acted as intervener on behalf of state consumers in gas, electric and telephone rate cases. He was a reporter for the Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader from 1967 to 1970. Headquartered in Charlotte, N.C., Duke Energy is a Fortune 500 company traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol DUK. More information about the company is available on the Internet at: <a href="http://www.duke-energy.com/" target="_blank">http://www.duke-energy.com/</a> 3080 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/219795980 2008-05-15 11:13:44 -0400 MIT Energy Conference <p>John Doerr is a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield &amp; Byers. Together with KPCB's partners, John has backed many of America's best entrepreneurial leaders, including: </p><ul><li>Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt: Google </li></ul><ul><li> Jeff Bezos: Amazon </li></ul><ul><li> Scott Cook, Bill Campbell: Intuit </li></ul><ul><li> Andy Bechtolsheim, Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, Vinod Khosla: Sun </li></ul><ul><li> And the founders of Compaq, Cypress, Macromedia and Symantec. </li></ul><p>These ventures have created more than 150,000 new jobs. In 1974 John joined a small chipmaker, Intel, just as they invented the legendary 8080 microprocessor. (He feels he was very lucky, in the right place at the right time). He worked in engineering, marketing and became a top-ranked sales executive. John joined KPCB in 1980 and soon started Silicon Compilers, a VLSI CAD software company, and @Home, the first broadband cable Internet service. John is passionate about: </p><ul><li>Green technology innovation and policy entrepreneurs to help fight global warming </li></ul><ul><li> Internet/web ventures with strong network effects </li></ul><ul><li> Building a new open nationwide wireless network </li></ul><ul><li> Breakthroughs to prevent pandemic avian flu and global infectious disease </li></ul><ul><li> Your vision for TNBT (The Next Big Thing)</li></ul> 2788 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/219768380 2008-05-15 11:14:36 -0400 MIT Energy Conference Susan Hockfield has served as the sixteenth president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since December 2004. A strong advocate of the vital role that science, technology, and the research university play in the world, she believes that MIT can best advance its historic mission of teaching, research, and service by providing robust and sustained support for the ideas and energies of its faculty and students. A noted neuroscientist whose research has focused on the development of the brain, Dr. Hockfield is the first life scientist to lead MIT and holds a faculty appointment as professor of neuroscience in the Institute's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Dr. Hockfield encourages collaborative work among MIT's schools, departments, and interdisciplinary laboratories and centers to keep the Institute at the forefront of innovation. She believes that MIT's strengths in engineering and science uniquely position the Institute to pioneer newly evolving, interdisciplinary areas and to translate them into practice. Together with MIT's traditions of excellence in architecture and planning, management, and the humanities, arts and social sciences, these strengths will allow the Institute to continue to develop powerful solutions to our era's greatest challenges. Under her leadership, MIT has launched a major Institute-wide initiative in energy research. 819