tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/292640240 2008-10-07 11:28:44 -0400 MIT Energy Initiative Representatives from the McCain and Obama campaigns faced off Monday, Oct. 6 for a debate on energy, moderated by NPR's Tom Ashbrook, host of the daily talk show "On Point." McCain was represented by James Woolsey, who was director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Clinton and has served in four different administrations, both Democratic and Republican. Obama was represented by Jason Grumet, executive director of the bipartisan National Commission on Energy Policy and former director of Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management. Questions were asked by journalists, Geoff Carr of the Economist and Susan McGinnis of CleanSkies.TV, as well as by a group of MIT students. The debate was co-sponsored by the student-run <a href="http://www.mitenergyclub.org/">MIT Energy Club</a> and the <a href="http://web.mit.edu/mitei/">MIT Energy Initiative</a>. 5251 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/292590560 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/292538600 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/292504220 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/292411680 2007-07-27 19:48:09 -0400 msrp2007 MIT Chemical Engineering Professor Jefferson Tester discusses geothermal energy and the future of U.S. engery policy, 7/26/2007 4719 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/292368920 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/292335860 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/292308880 2008-05-02 12:06:45 -0400 Compton Lecture Series U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., delivered a 2008 Compton lecture titled, "Forging a Clean Energy Future," Friday, April 25, in Kirsch Auditorium. 3616 tag:techtv.mit.edu,:Array/292283800 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/292253800 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