Towards the implementation of a co-ordinated congestion management mechanism on the Spanish-French interconnection: A joint TSO approach

This paper reviews the main steps achieved towards the implementation of a co-ordinated congestion management mechanism on the Spanish-French interconnection. This new mechanism intends to bring significant improvements in relation to the present situation, as well as to fully comply with the new European Commission Directive 54/2003 and Regulation 1228/2003. The implementation of the new co-ordinated mechanism which is now at the very advanced stage of the process has supposed more than five years of joint works between the incumbent parties in France and Spain. The new co-ordinated mechanism to be implemented is based on the joint proposal of both regulatory commissions, CRE, in France, and CNE, in Spain, who have proposed a stepwise approach for its implementation. The initial step of this regulators´ proposal basically consists of a co-ordinated allocation of physical transmission rights through a series of subsequent explicit auctions in different time frames (annual, monthly, daily and intraday auctions), giving the users the possibility to obtain cross-border capacity in a wide range of horizons. In a later stage, once the necessary conditions are fulfilled, the system will evolve towards a mechanism combining explicit auctions in different time frames and day-ahead market coupling