LSE Research Proposal Example: Electrical engineering to energy governance (Score 93)

High-voltage direct current (HVDC) interconnectors are increasingly central to European electricity integration, yet the pace and geography of their deployment remain uneven in ways that technical feasibility alone cannot explain. Offshore wind capacity targets across the North Sea, Baltic, and Celtic regions have outpaced the regulatory frameworks designed to authorise and cost-allocate the cross-border transmission infrastructure needed to carry that generation to load centres. The result is a documented planning bottleneck: projects that are technically viable and commercially attractive stall at the permitting and cost-sharing stage for years, sometimes indefinitely. This proposal investigates that bottleneck from a governance rather than an engineering perspective. The central research question is: to what extent do differences in national regulatory design explain variation in HVDC interconnector project outcomes across European Union member states between 2010 and 2024? Two subsidiary questions follow. First, which regulatory design features — specifically, cost-allocation rules, permitting timelines, and revenue certainty mechanisms — are most strongly associated with project completion rather than delay or cancellation? Second, does the presence of a bilateral intergovernmental agreement between the two connecting states moderate the effect of domestic regulatory quality on project outcomes? The question is bounded in three ways that make it tractable at MSc level: it is limited to projects listed on the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E) Ten-Year Network Development Plan (TYNDP), it covers a defined fourteen-year window, and it treats project outcome as a categorical dependent variable with three values — completed, under construction, and cancelled or indefinitely delayed. Two bodies of scholarship are directly relevant, and neither alone is sufficient. The infrastructure governance literature, drawing on work in comparative political economy and regulatory studies, has examined how institutional design affects large-scale energy investment. Scholars working in this tradition have shown that regulatory independence, tariff predictability, and permitting duration each affect investor behaviour in network industries. However, this literature has concentrated predominantly on gas pipelines and onshore electricity networks; offshore HVDC interconnectors, which involve multiple jurisdictions, novel cost-allocation problems, and hybrid public-private financing structures, receive limited treatment. The few studies that do address cross-border electricity infrastructure tend to focus on the EU's internal energy market as a whole rather than disaggregating by project-level regulatory conditions. The power systems and energy transition literature, by contrast, has produced detailed technical and economic assessments of HVDC interconnector viability — including modelling of capacity needs, loss profiles, and system balancing benefits. This work is strong on what the grid needs but largely silent on why specific projects proceed or fail. Engineering-economics studies typically treat regulatory approval as an exogenous delay rather than a variable to be explained. The gap at the intersection of these two literatures is an empirical, project-level analysis that uses regulatory design features as explanatory variables for interconnector outcomes. A small number of policy reports from organisations such as the European Commission's Joint Research Centre and the Florence School of Regulation have gestured at this question, but they have not applied systematic comparative methods or controlled for project-level technical and financial characteristics. This proposal is designed to fill that gap with a structured quantitative analysis. The study uses a cross-sectional dataset of HVDC interconnector projects drawn from the ENTSO-E TYNDP 2010–2024 editions. The TYNDP is a publicly available, biennial planning document that records project status, capacity, connecting countries, and estimated costs; it provides a consistent, independently compiled project register that avoids selection bias from relying on individual national sources. Preliminary scoping of the 2022 and 2024 TYNDP editions suggests a working population of approximately 60–80 distinct HVDC projects at various stages, which is sufficient for the analytical approach described below. The dependent variable — project outcome — will be coded from TYNDP status entries and cross-checked against publicly available national regulatory authority records and press sources. The primary independent variables will be constructed from two sources: the ACER (Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators) annual reports on cross-border cost allocation decisions, and the European Commission's country-level permitting duration data published under the Trans-European Energy Infrastructure Regulation (TEN-E). A binary variable for bilateral intergovernmental agreement will be coded from treaty registers maintained by the Council of the European Union. Analysis will proceed in two phases. Phase one applies descriptive statistics and bivariate comparisons to identify patterns in project outcomes across regulatory environments. Phase two uses ordered logistic regression, treating the three-category outcome variable as the dependent measure and including project-level controls for capacity (MW), estimated capital cost, offshore distance, and the year of first TYNDP listing. The regression is not designed to establish causal identification in the econometric sense; the proposal makes no claim to a natural experiment. The contribution is instead a systematic empirical description of associations that the existing literature has not produced, which can inform subsequent causal work. All data sources are publicly available. No primary data collection, interviews, or access to commercially sensitive information is required at this stage, which is an explicit scope boundary. The data sources described above are publicly accessible without institutional permissions or data-sharing agreements. ENTSO-E TYNDP documents are downloadable in full; ACER annual reports are open-access; TEN-E permitting data are published by the European Commission. The main data-assembly risk is inconsistency in project naming and status descriptions across TYNDP editions, which requires careful longitudinal matching. This is a known limitation of the source and will be addressed by constructing a project-level crosswalk table in the first phase of data work, with coding decisions documented for transparency. The study involves no human participants, no personal data, and no commercially confidential material. Standard research ethics obligations — accurate reporting, transparent coding, and acknowledgement of data limitations — apply but no formal ethics committee approval is anticipated to be required for a desk-based secondary analysis of public documents. This assumption will be confirmed against LSE's research ethics procedures at the outset of the project. A provisional timeline for a one-year MSc research project allocates the first term to literature consolidation and dataset construction, the second term to coding, regression analysis, and draft writing, and the summer period to revision and submission. The scope is deliberately constrained to avoid overreach: the study does not attempt to model optimal regulatory design, forecast future investment, or extend beyond the EU context. The LSE Department of Geography and Environment, which houses the MSc Energy Policy programme, has publicly documented research activity in energy governance, infrastructure regulation, and the political economy of the energy transition. The programme's methods training — including quantitative analysis and policy research design — directly supports the analytical approach proposed here. The regulatory economics and energy policy modules provide the conceptual vocabulary for operationalising variables such as regulatory independence and cost-allocation design, while the research methods component addresses the ordered logistic regression technique the study will use. The LSE Library's access to ACER publications, European Commission regulatory databases, and academic journals covering comparative political economy and energy studies means that all secondary sources required for the literature review and variable construction are accessible without additional resource requests. My undergraduate training in electrical engineering, including a final-year quantitative project that examined the governance dimensions of HVDC deployment, and a separate applied project on energy policy instrument design, provides the technical grounding to read TYNDP engineering specifications accurately and to assess whether project-level controls for capacity and distance are coded correctly. The transition from engineering to governance is not a departure from the subject matter; HVDC interconnectors are the same objects in both literatures. The shift is in the explanatory variable — from physics to institutions — and that shift is precisely what this research proposal is designed to pursue.