Allocation of transmission fixed charges: an overview

Abstract

The application of marginal cost in pricing the transmission services has shown not effective mainly due to revenue reconciliation problems. To overcome this, a set of other methods derived from the MW-mile rule has been suggested to allocate transmission fixed costs. This paper compares such methods known as embedded cost methods in a centralized transmission network environment. Although these methods actually share the total cost and are very simple, they are usually rejected due to the lack of a good economic reasoning. The economic issue and the impact on the system expansion planning of such allocation are addressed in this paper. Some examples with the Brazilian transmission system illustrate the results derived from this analysis.