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Long-term contracting is the traditional governance mechanism to deal with the transaction costs associated with the specificity of gas industry assets. Long-term contracts have been often used to allocate risks among players, and to that end, they often include take-or-pay provisions. These clauses specify that buyers take the volume risk, as they are obliged to pay for a minimum amount of gas consumption. In exchange, buyers pay a predefined price, supposedly lower than the risk-neutral expectation of short-term gas prices. In that view, if the buyer is able to resell that gas in the short term, the contract is an effective hedge against short-term volatility. Otherwise, the contract does not act as a hedge but it becomes a sunk cost. The corresponding power producers' behavior involves not only output decisions but also financial decisions. To analyze that situation, this paper develops a new quantitative methodology that allows comparing risk-neutral valuations of gas and power markets decisions. We test the model in a real-size system, and show the additional cost of the power system associated with a possible illiquidity of the short-term gas market. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many countries use auctions to select agents to which transmission concessions are awarded. Where multiple concessions are auctioned each year, there are potential benefits, for transcos and grid users, in using auction protocols allowing risk-averse bidders to explicitly consider complementary packages of transmission facilities: combinatorial and simultaneous descending auctions. We investigate the use of these protocols for transmission auctions, with aid of mixed-integer linear optimization models developed for this task and realistic case studies, while focusing on the treatment of the exposure problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the second of a two-paper series and presents a model to assess and promote investment projects defined in a plan of expansion of the transmission. We propose a model that consists of three main elements: valuation of a project based on the design of a linear contract, a principal-agent model to assess the optimal effort of an agent, and the right-of-way negotiating cost. We also define a model to evaluate bids by the agents. The value of the project depends on the number of competitors, the incentives to invest, and the right-of-way costs. The right-of-way cost is approached from the perspective of a bilateral bargaining problem. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Different regulatory frameworks have implemented competitive mechanisms to increase efficiency in transmission, a natural monopoly. Conflicts of interest and hidden costs make necessary to define methods to obtain an appropriate valuation of new transmission assets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]