The state and the market in the power sector planning

The process of transformation in the government and the operations in the power sector leads to the topic of interaction between increasingly integrated markets and the public agencies in charge of policy making, regulation and control. The search for efficiency is set on a global, strategical basis, and in front there stands the prospective function of the State, related to long range sustainability, protection of the environment, fair assignment of charges to the actors, valorization of natural resources, public taxation and subsidies policies, and progressive integration of multinational regions. This last subject of "globalization", with transnational integration and interaction all over the world, bring about the necessity of dealing with supranational mechanisms of regulation and control over technical and commercial matters. In recent years, increasing concern about the feasibility of completely deregulated markets put the global structure under scrutiny, and a new set of reforms are in place or under study in several countries The challenges implied by the growth of integrated power and energy markets are discussed in this paper, and some ideas are presented for improving the sector frames in order to reach more optimal social solutions. Two reference cases referring to Argentina and Brazil are included