Estimating Investment Needs for the Power Sector in the African Region

Abstract: This master thesis is based on collaboration between the division of Energy System Analysis at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology, KTH-dESA, and the African Development Bank, AfDB. The work has been carried out both at KTH (Stockholm, Sweden) and at AfDB (Tunis, Tunisia). The KTH-dESA – AfDB collaboration is related to previous projects, for example AIKP, the African Infrastructure Knowledge Program, which in turn is the result of a previous collaboration with the World Bank that led to the comprehensive knowledge program AICD, African Infrastructure Country Diagnostic. As in AIKP, a key part of AICD is to estimate infrastructure investment needs for the power sector.The main objective of this thesis is to create mathematical models of the power sectors in African countries.The output of these models shows, given the parameters used, what investments, power technologies and fuels that gives the lowest net present value for the modelling period (2010-2030 with focus on 2014-2020). The models developed will then be used to populate an Internet application hosted by AfDB. The application was earlier hosted by the World Bank. To develop the models, the free and open source software ANSWER OSeMOSYS is used. The program is developed in order to make long-run optimization models(Howells et al., 2011). Input data to the models was initially supposed to be provided by AfDB. This data was not available in time why temporary data, partly provided from KTH-dESA, is used and the number of countries investigated in this thesis is reduced to four instead of the original 18 countries.The models of the four countries are functional, even though the results of the simulations are not yet final. This is caused by the fact that focus has been put on the creation of the models rather than the results, since the models are to be re-populated with up-to-date data from AfDB. Generally, hydropower and coal STPP are commonly used power sources in the simulation results. The results of Egypt have a large share of technologies fueled by natural gas, which distinguishes the country from the other three. Also the Mauritius result differs, due to a relatively large share of power from off-grid PVs.The remaining objectives of the project, i.e. the completion of two minor country reports and a input data table for AfDB as well as establishing contacts at AfDB, are completed successfully but are not presented in this report.