The inherent inefficiency of simultaneously feasible financial transmission rights auctions

Empirical evidence shows that the clearing prices for point-to-point congestion revenue rights, also known as financial transmission rights (FTRs), resulting from centralized auctions conducted by Independent System Operators differ significantly and systematically from the realized congestion revenues that determine the accrued payoffs of these rights. The question addressed by this paper is whether such deviations are due to price discovery errors which will eventually vanish or due to inherent inefficiencies in the auction structure. We show that even with perfect foresight of average congestion rents the clearing prices for the FTRs depend on the bid quantity and therefore may not be priced correctly in the financial transmission right (FTR) auction. In particular, we demonstrate that if all FTR bid quantities are equal to the corresponding average transaction volumes and the bid values are set at the expected congestion rent level, then the resulting auction prices systematically deviate from the known FTR values. We conclude that price discovery alone would not remedy the discrepancy between the auction prices and the realized values of the FTRs. Secondary markets or frequent reconfiguration auctions are necessary in order to achieve such convergence.