Transmission Investments: Concepts for European Collaboration in Planning and Financing

European transmission grids face a huge challenge for the next decades. Driven by European energy policy goals aiming at sustainability, competitiveness and security of supply, massive investments in the transmission grids are required to enable these goals and fulll its tasks at the heart of the European power system. This challenge clearly plays at a larger level than the traditional national scale requiring stronger regional or European collaboration in planning and financing of investments.This thesis firstly performs an assessment of the current framework and analyzes how the European interest is integrated in the current investment planning, financing and decision-making process. It is observed that the national level remains crucial in this process and the incorporation of European goals is limited. Hence, an area of tension exists between both levels.Next, a formal framework is developed for investigating this wedge. Three collaboration concepts are defined. They dier in the assumed level of collaboration between the national decision-makers and in the assumed incorporation of European goals. The three concepts are modeled mathematically as QP, MPEC or EPEC and tested on small examples using standard solution methods. All models assume a static treatment of the time horizon, no uncertainties and a reactive planning approach with respect to generation investments. A perfectly competitive market with nodal pricing using a DC approximation for modeling the network and the flows is explicitly modeled in each concept. In the objective function only economic welfare is maximized. Comparison of the concepts allows drawing conclusions how different forms of collaboration influence the ultimate investment outcome.Abstract i Samenvatting iii Voorwoord v List of symbols and abbreviations vii Contents xi 1 Introduction 2 European transmission investment framework: ready for the challenge? 5 3 Concepts for transmission investment collaboration 21 4 Design of transmission planning models 35 5 Supranational planner 47 6 Pareto-planner 87 7 Non-cooperative planning game 121 8 Conclusions and recommendations for further research 145 Bibliography 153 A Calibration GA 167 B Alternative welfare definition 171 List of publications 173nrpages: 175status: publishe