Congestion management in the European electricity sector: Lessons from the European air transport sector

The electricity sector and the air transport sector are two network industries of crucial pan-European importance. Driven by liberalization and the increasing usage of their networks, they are both faced with the challenge of network congestion and its efficient management at national and European scale. Given the head-start of liberalization in the air transport sector, the development of congestion management mechanisms began about a decade earlier than in the electricity sector and achieved significant performance improvements. This paper compares the approaches to congestion management in the two sectors from a technical and institutional point of view. It concludes that congestion management in the European electricity sector could be improved by applying coordination and optimization mechanisms established in the European air transport sector.