Collaborative Governance in the European Transmission Network Investment for Cross-Border Cooperation

The current pan European transmission network planning and investment mechanism comes from the requirements of Third Energy Package. Countries participate in the pan European cross-border network investments by sharing the same planning methodology and investment process. However, energy mix determination, network investment approval and remuneration regulation are the responsibilities of national authorities. Incentives for stakeholders at national or local level are not always aligned for cross-border coordination. To break the gridlock from current fragmented national decision making structure in interconnection investments, this research proposes collaborative governance for cross-border investments that directly involves affected user in voting on potential projects. A poly centric collaborative governance structure for European cross-border transmission network investments is presented, which involves stakeholders at the subnational, national and regional levels. A novel mechanism, the user voting approach, is proposed to complement administrative project approval for network investment decision making