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High Wire Act: Electricity Transmission Infrastructure and its Impact on  the Renewable Energy Market / Letha Tawney, Ruth Greenspan Bell, Micah  Ziegler, WRI, April 2011, 50 p.http://www.wri.org/publication/high-wire-actContext (© WRI) :Renewable energy (RE)—electricity from wind, solar, and other naturally renewing energy sources— has drawn increasing attention in the quest to reduce greenhouse gases on a scale commensurate with the dictates of climate science. Renewables have the potential to substitute for a significant proportion of the conventional fossil fuels prevalent in today’s electricity generation. However, two key features of renewable energy complicate this promise. First, renewable energy resources are location constrained and often available only in remote areas. Their energy must therefore be transported via connected transmission lines (the grid) to demand centers, such as cities. Second, because RE resources are typically intermittent, this energy must be stored or managed with other generation sources to provide a stable and reliable service to consumers. One effective way to address this intermittency is widespread interconnection to diverse resource areas so that low production in one location can be balanced by high production in another. These two important attributes, location-constrained generation and intermittency, mean that transmission is critical to unlocking the promise of renewable energy.About this Paper (© WRI) :This paper examines transmission developments and challenges in the European Union (EU), China, and the United States—three regions that present entirely different pictures in terms of governance structures, institutions, and traditions for making decisions about transmission.Transmission infrastructure can be either a roadblock or an enabling technology for meeting renewable energy deployment goals and thus presents a poorly understood risk to RE investment. To provide context for renewable energy investors, this report examines the policy challenges of providing transmission to:- Move electricity from large-scale renewable energy generation in remote areas to distant demand centers- Facilitate regional grid interconnections necessary to manage intermittency. Because transmission is highly dependent on government decisions at both the political and administrative level, this paper emphasizes the regulatory trends in transmission that in turn affect renewable energy investments.