West Africa is wiring itself into one market
A four-hour test announced last November ran the region’s grids as a single synchronous network for the first time, and the power pool behind it wants that permanent by mid-year. The World Economic Forum’s Rakesh Bohra and Justine Roche set out the reforms, and the $36 billion pipeline, asking investors to pay attention.
A single transmission line running 1,550km through Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire was one of two corridors put in front of investors at a World Economic Forum dialogue this year, alongside the reinforcement of the Coastal Transmission Backbone between Nigeria and Benin. Projects of that reach only make sense if the region they cross behaves like a single buyer, and that is the direction West Africa’s power system is now heading.
The West African Power Pool, the ECOWAS agency created more than 25 years ago to knit 14 national electricity systems into a regional market, has spent most of its life as an engineering project. Writing for the World Economic Forum this week, Rakesh Bohra and Justine Roche argue the story has changed, and that what is being designed now is the market itself, the rules that give an investor confidence a cross-border trade will be honoured. It is the West African chapter of an argument now running the length of the continent, that trading rules are what make regional power financeable.
The bill is written down. The pool’s regional master plan identifies 75 priority projects needing approximately US$36.39 billion, among them 28 transmission builds covering roughly 22,932km and 47 generation projects amounting to about 15.49GW, and it expects electricity demand across the ECOWAS region to grow by more than 8% a year. Demand growing at that pace is its own argument for planning the build regionally rather than country by country.
The machinery is arriving in stages. Grid operators proved the physics in November, when a four-hour test held West African grids together in one synchronous system, a first for the region, and the pool has set the middle of this year as its target for making the synchronisation permanent. The commercial layer is following, with a day-ahead market being introduced to bring scheduled, auction-based trading and clear price signals, and work underway on standardised transmission cost recovery so that the owner of a line can predict what carrying a neighbour’s power will earn.
The generation to trade is there to be built. The region’s 28 transboundary river basins carry hydropower potential the ECOWAS master plan puts at 12 to 13GW by 2033, and solar irradiation across the belt runs at 5 to 7kWh per square metre a day, among the highest levels anywhere. The Gambia’s Soma solar and battery project, at roughly 150MW, is the shape of the utility-scale pipeline to come, and Bohra and Roche’s point for investors is that much of it arrives already structured, prepared projects inside government-backed frameworks with long-term power purchase agreements and sovereign support behind them.
What would make West Africa’s power market one of the continent’s defining infrastructure stories, on the authors’ reckoning, is the pool continuing to turn technical progress into commercial confidence, and the timetable for testing that is short. Permanent synchronisation is targeted for the middle of this year, with the day-ahead market behind it, and the 75 projects on the master plan are waiting to find out whether capital moves at the same speed.
All photos credit: Unsplash
