Sustainable development of the West African Power Pool: Increasing solar energy integration and regional electricity trade

The West African region is currently experiencing the challenge of meeting rapidly the growing electricity demand which has played a critical role in the low economic development rate of the region. To tackle these challenges, the West African Power Pool was established to build regional power plants and interconnected transmission infrastructures between the countries. In this study, we develop a multi-region economic dispatch model with hourly simulations to evaluate the impact of increased integration of solar PV on the interconnected West Africa electricity network. Our results show the high integration of solar PV plants reduces the supply-demand gap and load shedding in the region. All countries in the region potentially benefit from avoided generation cost and decrease in unserved electricity demand. Our study presents a sustainable strategy to diversify from hydro and gas regional projects and invest in solar PV in order to improve electricity supply and reduce the high electricity prices in the region.