ECOWAS Regional Access Project

The ECOWAS Regional Electricity Access Program has the potential to finance the reinforcement and extension of the distribution network across eleven countries in West Africa, this component of the project focuses on The Gambia, Guinea Bissau and Mali. The project aims at connecting 300,000 household within 100km of the substation currently ongoing under the OMVG regional interconnection project (2 substations in The Gambia and 4 substations in Guinea-Bissau, 1 in Senegal to connect Guinea Bissau) and the OMVS regional interconnector project (4 substations in Mali)

IED was contracted by the World Bank to perform a geospatial electrification plan in order to prepare a preliminary design and cost estimate of the LV and MV networks required to connect households located in the perimeter of the above mentioned 10 substations.

The study was done following two main axes for each of the three countries: densification in already electrified cities and villages and grid extension. IED used its in-house software GEOSIM to perform this analysis. GEOSIM provided the load forecast, the optimization of villages to be connected by grid extension, least cost optimization of the MV feeder path, and the economic analysis of extending the grid.

20th July 2018