An efficient cross-border investment and well-designed markets and regulatory instruments are crucial prerequisites to the creation of a fully functional European internal electricity market. One of the prominent regulatory measures taken to speed up the creation of the internal market was to abolish tariff pancaking by replacing cross-border tariffs with an Inter-Transmission System Operators Compensation (ITC) mechanism through which transmission system operators (TSOs) can compensate each other. In this study, the implication of introducing such mechanism on the cross-border investment outcome is explored. The results indicate that the current ITC mechanism is loosely linked to the cross-border investment decisions of TSOs. In addition, the study concludes that factors such as the ITC fund size and the number of participating TSOs can influence the investment outcome.

Onshore, generators are connected to the transmission grid by TSOs. This regulatory model could simply be extended to offshore (i.e. Germany), but the connection of offshore wind farms to shore is also an opportunity to test alternatives, i.e. the third party model (i.e. the UK) or the generator model (i.e. Sweden). In this paper, we argue that the third party and generator models are indeed better suited to support the evolution towards larger scale offshore wind farms that are increasingly developed farther out to sea, while the TSO model is better suited to support the evolution towards cross-border offshore grid projects. In other words, an important trade-off needs to be made because none of the existing regulatory models can fulfill all the expectations in the current context in Europe. And, the trade-off has to be made at the regional or EU level because the different national regulatory frameworks are incompatible when applied to a cross-border offshore grid project.