Europe requires significant transmission grid expansions to foster the integration of electricity markets, enhance security of supply and integrate renewable energies. However, next to lengthy authorization processes, transmission system operators (TSOs) in Europe are currently facing extreme public opposition in their transmission line projects leading to significant project delays. These delays imply significant additional costs for TSOs as well as society as a whole and put the transformation of the European energy system at risk. Existing scientific literature currently lacks comprehensive studies that have tried to identify generalizable success factors to overcome public opposition in transmission line projects. The goal of work at hand was to close this research gap. Potential success factors were collected through extensive literature review and interviews throughout Europe with respective stakeholders such as citizen action groups, NGOs or energy experts. Experiences from analogue large infrastructure projects like wind parks, carbon capture and storage facilities, hydro dams, nuclear waste repositories, etc. were also used to form hypotheses. The findings were transformed into a structural equation model and tested through a questionnaire answered by almost all European TSOs. Results revealed that people’s trust in the TSO is of utmost importance for less public opposition. It can be regarded as the critical success factor per se. TSOs can create trust through stakeholder participation, sufficient communication, proper organizational readiness and liaison with stakeholders. Furthermore, appropriate technical planning can help to reduce public opposition in transmission line projects. In total 18 concrete and actionable success factors were identified for TSO management to facilitate the establishment of these aforementioned aspects. They will help European TSOs to reduce public opposition and thus accelerate the implementation of new transmission lines. Interestingly, economic benefits for people did not turn out to be a Significant success factor in reducing their opposition against new transmission lines.

Les ouvrages de transport d’électricité ont d’abord été pensés un par un, reliant un excédent de production à un besoin de consommation. Ils ont ainsi parfois très naturellement et dès l’origine traversé les frontières des États pour répondre à leur raison d’être. Les secteurs électriques se structurant fortement lorsque le virage électrique fut pris, les interconnexions entre pays furent conçues par les techniciens comme une mesure élémentaire de sûreté et d’équilibre de ce produit atypique qu’est l’électricité. En France plus particulièrement, lorsque la production électronucléaire se développa à partir des années 1970, ces interconnexions devinrent petit à petit sources de revenus pour l’entreprise nationale, et d’équilibre pour la balance commerciale nationale. L’intérêt grandissant porté au secteur électrique par les institutions européennes à la fin des années 1990 vient ébranler les acteurs économiques géographiques verticaux, et rebat les cartes des enjeux à adresser à une maille plus large que l’État nation. Dans ces transformations successives, les interconnexions aux frontières, et particulièrement aux frontières françaises, jouent ainsi un rôle tout à fait spécifique et de plus en plus structurant pour les économies ouvertes des pays européens. Les réseaux de transport électriques continuent ainsi une mutation entamée dans les années 1970 qui les a conduits de la condition de mal nécessaire à celle de vecteurs indispensables de transformation des économies européennes. L’objet de ce mémoire est d’illustrer la très grande capacité d’adaptation de ces organes industriels, économiques, sociétaux et politiques, dont on pourrait faussement penser qu’ils sont immobilisés par leur nature capitalistique, à travers les enjeux portés par les interconnexions aux frontières françaises. Les sources sont à la fois issues de données des opérateurs techniques, de la documentation – encore peu fréquente – sur ces sujets, ainsi que des statistiques officielles du ministère français. Cette capacité d’innovation et de développement de « couches de services » permet aujourd’hui aux grands réseaux de transport de traverser les époques et la variabilité des orientations de leurs environnements, durablement. / Transmission networks were first thought one by one, connecting a production surplus to a consumer need. They thus sometimes very naturally and from the outset crossed state boundaries to suit their purpose. The electrical sector reinforced itself strongly as the electric turn was taken. The interconnections between countries were thought by technicians as a basic security measure and balance of this unusual product that is electricity. In France especially, where nuclear power generation developed from the 1970s, these interconnections gradually became a source of revenue for the national company, and furnished surplus for the national trade balance. The growing interest in the electric power sector by the European institutions in the late 1990s challenged the vertical geographical economic players and shifted the stakes to a framework wider than the nation state. In these successive transformations, cross-border interconnections, especially across the French borders, play a specific and increasingly structuring rôle for open economies of European countries. The electrical transmission networks continue a transition that began in the 1970s, and took them from being a necessary evil to the status of essential factors of the European economies. The purpose of this thesis is to illustrate the wide adaptability of these industrial, economic, societal and political bodies, apparently immobilized by their capital-intensive nature. It does so by way of issues relating to interconnections at the French borders. Sources are technical data from operators, literature – although rare - on these topics, as well as official statistics from the French ministry. This strong capacity for innovation and development of "service layers " now allows major transportation networks to endure even as their environment changes.

A partir do processo de liberalização do setor de energia em diversos países e, em particular, no Brasil, na década de 90, mecanismos de regulação por incentivos têm sido implementados como forma de assegurar a eficiência produtiva e alocativa do setor. Entretanto, a relação entre o desenvolvimento teórico destes mecanismos e sua aplicação não tem sido amplamente analisada. Neste sentido, este trabalho tem por objetivo avaliar os efeitos da regulação por incentivos na eficiência e produtividade do setor de transmissão de energia elétrica no Brasil entre os anos de 2002 e 2014. O método Malmquist-DEA foi aplicado para avaliar a evolução da eficiência relativa e da produtividade das empresas transmissoras mais representativas do mercado nacional entre os anos de 2002 e 2014. Os resultados permitem constatar comportamentos diferentes entre as empresas e colocaram em evidência os efeitos da desverticalização e principalmente da privatização de algumas empresas do setor. Em termos gerais, o setor de transmissão apresentou um pequeno aumento do Índice Malmquist médio para o período analisado influenciado principalmente pelo acréscimo de produtividade verificados em 2007 e 2014 em relação aos anos anteriores. Em contrapartida a maioria das empresas (6 de um total de 8) apresentaram decréscimo na produtividade média no período analisado. Adicionalmente, os resultados corroboram o modelo teórico dos efeitos da regulação por incentivos para promover o aumento da eficiência do setor de energia brasileiro. Apesar deste aumento de eficiência em algumas empresas do setor, observa-se que ainda há muitas oportunidades de melhorias operacionais, eficiência produtiva, e apropriação de tecnologia por parte das empresas reguladas. O trabalho também apresenta implicações relevantes para os gestores de empresas e para os órgãos reguladores, com o intuito de aumentar a eficiência e a produtividade das empresas brasileiras do setor de transmissão de energia elétrica. / Since the process of liberalization of the energy sector in several countries, and particularly in Brazil in the 1990s, incentive regulation mechanisms have been implemented as a means of ensuring the productive and allocative efficiency of the sector. However, the relationship between the theoretical development of these mechanisms and their application has not been widely analyzed. In this sense, the objective of this work is to evaluate the effects of incentive regulation on the efficiency and productivity of the electric power transmission sector in Brazil between 2002 and 2014. The Malmquist-DEA method was applied to evaluate the evolution of relative efficiency and the productivity of the most representative transmission companies in the national market between 2002 and 2014. The results show different behaviors between companies and highlighted the effects of the de-verticalization and mainly the privatization of some companies in the sector. In general terms, the transmission sector showed a small increase in the average Malmquist Index for the period analyzed, mainly influenced by the increase in productivity in 2007 and 2014 in relation to previous years. In contrast, the majority of companies (6 out of 8) had a decrease in average productivity in the period analyzed. Additionally, the results corroborate the theoretical model of the effects of regulation by incentives to promote the increase of the efficiency of the Brazilian energy sector. Despite this increase in efficiency in some companies in the sector, it is observed that there are still many opportunities for operational improvements, productive efficiency, and the appropriation of technology by regulated companies. The work also has relevant implications for business managers and regulatory bodies, with the aim of increasing the efficiency and productivity of Brazilian companies in the electricity transmission sector.

Error resilience is an important issue when coded video data is transmitted over wired and wireless networks. Errors can be introduced by network congestion, mis-routing and channel noise. These transmission errors can result in bit errors being introduced into the transmitted data or packets of data being completely lost. Consequently, the quality of the decoded video is degraded significantly. This thesis describes new techniques for minimising this degradation. To verify video error resilience tools, it is first necessary to consider the methods used to carry out experimental measurements. For most audio-visual services, streams of both audio and video data need to be simultaneously transmitted on a single channel. The inclusion of the impact of multiplexing schemes, such as MPEG 2 Systems, in error resilience studies is also an important consideration. It is shown that error resilience measurements including the effect of the Systems Layer differ significantly from those based only on the Video Layer. Two major issues of error resilience are investigated within this thesis. They are resynchronisation after error detection and error concealment. Results for resynchronisation using small slices, adaptive slice sizes and macroblock resynchronisation schemes are provided. These measurements show that the macroblock resynchronisation scheme achieves the best performance although it is not included in MPEG2 standard. The performance of the adaptive slice size scheme, however, is similar to that of the macroblock resynchronisation scheme. This approach is compatible with the MPEG 2 standard. The most important contribution of this thesis is a new concealment technique, namely, Decoder Motion Vector Estimation (DMVE). The decoded video quality can be improved significantly with this technique. Basically, this technique utilises the temporal redundancy between the current and the previous frames, and the correlation between lost macroblocks and their surrounding pixels. Therefore, motion estimation can be applied again to search in the previous picture for a match to those lost macroblocks. The process is similar to that the encoder performs, but it is in the decoder. The integration of techniques such as DMVE with small slices, or adaptive slice sizes or macroblock resynchronisation is also evaluated. This provides an overview of the performance produced by individual techniques compared to the combined techniques. Results show that high performance can be achieved by integrating DMVE with an effective resynchronisation scheme, even at a high cell loss rates. The results of this thesis demonstrate clearly that the MPEG 2 standard is capable of providing a high level of error resilience, even in the presence of high loss. The key to this performance is appropriate tuning of encoders and effective concealment in decoders.

This dissertation focuses on selected aspects of network congestion arising in liberalized electricity markets and their management methods with a special weight placed on the integration of increased renewable generation in Europe and Germany. In a first step, the theoretical concepts of congestion management are introduced complemented by a review of current management regimes in selected countries. In the second step, the European approach of managing congestion on international as well as national transmission links is analyzed and the benefits of an integrated congestion management regime are quantified. It is concluded that benefits can be achieved by a closer cooperation of national transmission system operators (TSOs). Thirdly, the German congestion management regime is investigated and the impact of higher renewable generation up to 2020 on congestion management cost is determined. It is shown that a homogeneous and jointly development of generation and transmission infrastructure is a prerequisite for the application of congestion alleviation methods and once they diverge congestion management cost tend to increase substantially. Lastly, the impact of intermittent and uncertain wind generation on electricity markets is analyzed. A stochastic electricity market model is described, which replicates the daily subsequent clearing of reserve, dayahead, and intraday market typical for European countries, and numerical results are presented.

This dissertation focuses on selected aspects of network congestion arising in liberalized electricity markets and their management methods with a special weight placed on the integration of increased renewable generation in Europe and Germany. In a first step, the theoretical concepts of congestion management are introduced complemented by a review of current management regimes in selected countries. In the second step, the European approach of managing congestion on international as well as national transmission links is analyzed and the benefits of an integrated congestion management regime are quantified. It is concluded that benefits can be achieved by a closer cooperation of national transmission system operators (TSOs). Thirdly, the German congestion management regime is investigated and the impact of higher renewable generation up to 2020 on congestion management cost is determined. It is shown that a homogeneous and jointly development of generation and transmission infrastructure is a prerequisite for the application of congestion alleviation methods and once they diverge congestion management cost tend to increase substantially. Lastly, the impact of intermittent and uncertain wind generation on electricity markets is analyzed. A stochastic electricity market model is described, which replicates the daily subsequent clearing of reserve, dayahead, and intraday market typical for European countries, and numerical results are presented.

The electric power is one of the key products without which functioning of our society would be hard to imagine. The electricity distribution network is an interconnected system comprising of a manufacturing part producing electricity from various sources, a transmission system of conductors and equipment, distribution systems of high and low voltage, and of technical control stations suitably distributed to control the whole network. Energy security means ensuring continuity of necessary supplies of energy and energy services to accommodate the protected interests of the state. A long-term electric power failure may have serious consequences for the state security, for providing for basic subsistence needs of the population, individual?s health or the state economy. For their maintenance under ordinary as well as emergency conditions it is particularly necessary to ensure functioning of critical infrastructure. The aim of this thesis is to examine the level of preparedness of the subjects within the critical infrastructure for a long-term interruption of electric power supplies and to create a draft of an emergency preparedness plan of a subject within the critical infrastructure focused on a long-term electric power failure. The research part of the thesis has two parts. The first part includes processing and analysis of the data acquired though a questionnaire survey. The second one presents a draft of the emergency preparedness plan of a subject within the critical infrastructure. The results of the questionnaire survey showed a good readiness of the critical infrastructure for a long-term, extensive electric power failure, which confirms the set hypothesis. The thesis introduces the public, particularly the subjects of the critical infrastructure, to the possibilities of occurrence of long-term, extensive electric power failures, with available prevention of such emergency situations and their preparation, planning and solving. The presented emergency plan draft should help with preparation of an emergency readiness plan of a subject within the critical infrastructure, including outlining the ways to solve emergency situations that may arise in relation with a power failure, and thus to improve protection of the critical infrastructure elements.

A partir do processo de liberalização do setor de energia em diversos países e, em particular, no Brasil, na década de 90, mecanismos de regulação por incentivos têm sido implementados como forma de assegurar a eficiência produtiva e alocativa do setor. Entretanto, a relação entre o desenvolvimento teórico destes mecanismos e sua aplicação não tem sido amplamente analisada. Neste sentido, este trabalho tem por objetivo avaliar os efeitos da regulação por incentivos na eficiência e produtividade do setor de transmissão de energia elétrica no Brasil entre os anos de 2002 e 2014. O método Malmquist-DEA foi aplicado para avaliar a evolução da eficiência relativa e da produtividade das empresas transmissoras mais representativas do mercado nacional entre os anos de 2002 e 2014. Os resultados permitem constatar comportamentos diferentes entre as empresas e colocaram em evidência os efeitos da desverticalização e principalmente da privatização de algumas empresas do setor. Em termos gerais, o setor de transmissão apresentou um pequeno aumento do Índice Malmquist médio para o período analisado influenciado principalmente pelo acréscimo de produtividade verificados em 2007 e 2014 em relação aos anos anteriores. Em contrapartida a maioria das empresas (6 de um total de 8) apresentaram decréscimo na produtividade média no período analisado. Adicionalmente, os resultados corroboram o modelo teórico dos efeitos da regulação por incentivos para promover o aumento da eficiência do setor de energia brasileiro. Apesar deste aumento de eficiência em algumas empresas do setor, observa-se que ainda há muitas oportunidades de melhorias operacionais, eficiência produtiva, e apropriação de tecnologia por parte das empresas reguladas. O trabalho também apresenta implicações relevantes para os gestores de empresas e para os órgãos reguladores, com o intuito de aumentar a eficiência e a produtividade das empresas brasileiras do setor de transmissão de energia elétrica. / Since the process of liberalization of the energy sector in several countries, and particularly in Brazil in the 1990s, incentive regulation mechanisms have been implemented as a means of ensuring the productive and allocative efficiency of the sector. However, the relationship between the theoretical development of these mechanisms and their application has not been widely analyzed. In this sense, the objective of this work is to evaluate the effects of incentive regulation on the efficiency and productivity of the electric power transmission sector in Brazil between 2002 and 2014. The Malmquist-DEA method was applied to evaluate the evolution of relative efficiency and the productivity of the most representative transmission companies in the national market between 2002 and 2014. The results show different behaviors between companies and highlighted the effects of the de-verticalization and mainly the privatization of some companies in the sector. In general terms, the transmission sector showed a small increase in the average Malmquist Index for the period analyzed, mainly influenced by the increase in productivity in 2007 and 2014 in relation to previous years. In contrast, the majority of companies (6 out of 8) had a decrease in average productivity in the period analyzed. Additionally, the results corroborate the theoretical model of the effects of regulation by incentives to promote the increase of the efficiency of the Brazilian energy sector. Despite this increase in efficiency in some companies in the sector, it is observed that there are still many opportunities for operational improvements, productive efficiency, and the appropriation of technology by regulated companies. The work also has relevant implications for business managers and regulatory bodies, with the aim of increasing the efficiency and productivity of Brazilian companies in the electricity transmission sector.

This dissertation focuses on selected aspects of network congestion arising in liberalized electricity markets and their management methods with a special weight placed on the integration of increased renewable generation in Europe and Germany. In a first step, the theoretical concepts of congestion management are introduced complemented by a review of current management regimes in selected countries. In the second step, the European approach of managing congestion on international as well as national transmission links is analyzed and the benefits of an integrated congestion management regime are quantified. It is concluded that benefits can be achieved by a closer cooperation of national transmission system operators (TSOs). Thirdly, the German congestion management regime is investigated and the impact of higher renewable generation up to 2020 on congestion management cost is determined. It is shown that a homogeneous and jointly development of generation and transmission infrastructure is a prerequisite for the application of congestion alleviation methods and once they diverge congestion management cost tend to increase substantially. Lastly, the impact of intermittent and uncertain wind generation on electricity markets is analyzed. A stochastic electricity market model is described, which replicates the daily subsequent clearing of reserve, dayahead, and intraday market typical for European countries, and numerical results are presented.

This dissertation focuses on selected aspects of network congestion arising in liberalized electricity markets and their management methods with a special weight placed on the integration of increased renewable generation in Europe and Germany. In a first step, the theoretical concepts of congestion management are introduced complemented by a review of current management regimes in selected countries. In the second step, the European approach of managing congestion on international as well as national transmission links is analyzed and the benefits of an integrated congestion management regime are quantified. It is concluded that benefits can be achieved by a closer cooperation of national transmission system operators (TSOs). Thirdly, the German congestion management regime is investigated and the impact of higher renewable generation up to 2020 on congestion management cost is determined. It is shown that a homogeneous and jointly development of generation and transmission infrastructure is a prerequisite for the application of congestion alleviation methods and once they diverge congestion management cost tend to increase substantially. Lastly, the impact of intermittent and uncertain wind generation on electricity markets is analyzed. A stochastic electricity market model is described, which replicates the daily subsequent clearing of reserve, dayahead, and intraday market typical for European countries, and numerical results are presented.