West Africa’s regional electricity market enters its first full trading year in January
The grids are synchronised, all fourteen continental countries are connected and two national utilities have already moved into surplus by buying across a border. What has not been tested is whether a market with no new generation behind it can keep clearing.
The West African Power Pool and the ECOWAS Regional Electricity Regulatory Authority now run the interconnected grids in synchronous operation and have expanded trade between them. January will be the market’s first full trading year.
The physical network is finished. All fourteen continental West African countries have been joined in a single grid since late 2023. The Gambia River Basin Development Organisation interconnection runs 1,677km of 225kV line with 800MW of transfer capacity across Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Senegal and The Gambia, at around 880 million euros. A 1,303km line joins Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, and a 228km line connects Kayes in Mali to Tambacounda.
The financial results are already visible on national balance sheets. The Gambia’s NAWEC has returned to profitability on cost savings of around 42 per cent achieved by drawing Guinean hydropower across the loop rather than burning imported fuel. Guinea-Bissau’s EAGB has moved from a monthly deficit of roughly one million dollars to a positive balance. Guinea exports 1,174 GWh a year from the Kaleta and Souapiti plants.
Every one of those gains is a trading gain rather than a generation gain. The same hydropower is being shared more efficiently across more borders, which is what an interconnector is for and also what it runs out of.
Generation is the next constraint and it is thinner than the transmission. The Sambangalou hydroelectric scheme in Senegal is planned at 128MW and expected to produce 402 GWh a year into the same loop. Against a network now serving several national systems, that is one project.
A market clears on the difference between what a seller has spare and what a buyer needs. Both sides of that equation change when a dry season reduces hydro output across a basin that four countries now draw from at once, and the traded volumes of 2026 have not yet met a bad year.
Ministers, regulators and financiers meet in Accra in January for the West Africa Energy Cooperation Summit, with a functioning market to discuss for the first time and the question of what fills it after Sambangalou.
