Efficiency and Stability in Electrical Power Transmission Networks: a Partition Function Form Approach

The users of electricity networks are organized into groups where the production and consumption of electricity is in balance. We study the formation of these balancing groups using a cooperative game in partition function form defined over an ideal (lossless) DC load flow model of the power grid. We show that such games contain widespread externalities that can be both negative and positive. We study the stability of certain partitions using the concept of the recursive core. While the game is clearly cohesive, we demonstrate that it is not necessarily superadditive. We argue that subadditivity may be a barrier to achieve full cooperation.