The REALISEGRID cost-benefit methodology to rank pan-European infrastructure investments

The development of the Renewable Energy Source (RES) generation in Europe is lately occurring at a very fast pace under the push of the European energy and climate change policy targets and the consequent incentive schemes applied at national level. At the same time, the electrical borders of the European Countries have recently been opened to host a significant amount of cross-border trade. All these aspects put the European electricity transmission backbones on the critical path and call for their swift reinforcement. However, the European dimension of the problem requests a pan-European vision to the transmission planning, so as to overcome the country-based approach followed up to present by the Transmission System Operators (TSOs). This paper presents the new methodology set up by the European research project REALISEGRID for the cost-benefit analysis of new grid infrastructures, one of the main steps of the transmission planning process, and the basic hypotheses of its validation on a real-sized multi-national model. This test bed applies the new cost-benefit methodology to the ranking of the links belonging to the so-called EL2 priority axis mentioned in the TEN-E Guidelines document published by the European Commission in 2006.