Turkey - Romania subsea transmission cable investment: Time for reconsideration?

Transmission investment is important for integrating electricity markets operated by different countries/transmission system operators (TSOs). Turkey and Romania have proposed a transmission cable linking the transmission network between two countries under the Black Sea, but this investment has been found infeasible due to the insufficient technical and financial benefits to the countries/TSOs. Now, there may be a case for revisiting this project given emerging national and global policy frameworks leading to a “shadow price” for carbon requiring decision analysis for investments to be guided by an explicit accounting of carbon-constraints. We propose a method that estimates the overall net benefit investing in this project by evaluating the project from the following perspectives: (1) economics where the energy resources of both countries are better utilized by evaluating the electricity supply and demand of each country (2) financial where the additional access to European electricity markets brings more trades in when the two promising markets are physically coupled (3) environmental where the effect of emission constraints are introduced.