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to mature and become more cost-competitive. This might reduce the necessity or atleast the intensity of other kinds of policy initiatives to encourage deployment. In short,by far the most promising options for both reducing carbon emissions and profoundlyaffecting the prospects of most, if not all, power generation technologies to reduceemissions are efforts to develop and deploy technologies and other means of promotingimproved energy efficiency.In addition to promising initiatives that apply to essentially all LCETs, each technologyhas its own features limiting the rate of commercial deployment. Some technologiesrequire substantial continued development or fundamental innovation, despite being ona fast development track already, to reduce cost or mitigate performance risks andcompete with traditional options. Many have geographic constraints that limit theirpotential in many parts of the world. Tragic or costly experiences with some quitemature technologies have led to deployments at much reduced rates than expected.The LCETs identified in these conditions are described below.A. Hydroelectric powerHydroelectric power generation is for the most part a mature, well-developed and widelydeployed technology. This is especially true for large-scale hydropower, although modestincreases in turbine efficiency can still yield significant increases in capacity even atexisting facilities. As the prospect for new large-scale hydropower worldwide is modestand geographically concentrated, an engineering initiative to examine the potential forcapacity expansion might be the most important and immediate step required in existinglarge-scale facilities. Small-scale hydropower has much more potential for substantiallyincreased deployment, but the obstacles are much more site-specific. It is possiblethat more standardized designs could help facilitate faster deployment, especially incountries with large sparsely populated land areas.B. Solar electric powerThe most promising and possible initiatives for accelerating the deployment of solartechnologies vary considerably by technology, especially for photovoltaics (PV) versussolar thermal or concentrating solar power (CSP), although there are some initiativesthat could dramatically affect the prospects of all solar technologies.Despite significant cost reductions in recent years, the prospects of PV hinge largelyon further cost reductions in both raw materials and fabrication of PV cells and modules.Manufacturing economies realized through automation in large capacity plants for siliconbasedPVs, utilization of lower cost commodity elements such as copper, zinc andtin, continued development of organic hybrid PV cells, etc. are useful efforts in thisdirection. The most promising initiatives that address both these cost dimensions areaccelerated R&D and building platforms for large-scale deployment. Additional factorsthat affect cost vary with location and include cost of land, options of orientation (e.g.,rooftops), level of solar insolation and perhaps the availability of power networkinterconnection and regulatory policies affecting that interconnection. Cost is the majorfactor limiting the rate of deployment of CSP technologies as well. In many respects,CSP technologies are relatively mature in terms of basic technology design andconfiguration. Although additional R&D will continue to bring costs down, increased39