Evaluation of transmission congestion impact in market power

Restructuring of electrical market worldwide has brought the issue of market competition to the forefront. This new perspective has given rise to competition with the goal of price fall and technological innovation in the sector. In the last few years a great deal of attention is given to the possibility of a group of producers (agents) exercising market power by means of congestion effects. The possibility of two agents acting in a combined way on the transmission system affecting the accessibility by the others to a specific market is analyzed. This paper describes an algorithm used to detect, quantify and evaluate the impact of these kind of strategic actions on market concentration. The results obtained from the study on two distinct example networks show that this kind of actions can affect strongly market share and must be predicted by the ISO.