Consumers coordination and cooperation in transmission cost allocation

The profound change in the electric industry worldwide in the last twenty years assigns an increasing importance to electric market agents' interaction, even if these are competitive markets like generation and commercialization, or non-competitive transmission and distribution markets. The agent's cooperation and coordination through coalition formation in cost allocation of investment, electric network operation and maintenance, arises as an attractive solution, if one has an appropriate technical and economic modeling. The obtained solutions in such cases are efficient, fair and equitable to participant agents. A transmission cost allocation method is presented, based on cooperative game theory and transmission network capacity use by consumer agents. It is applied to the main Chilean interconnected system and the obtained results are compared with traditional methodologies.