Modeling the African Power System
Context
Access to a stable and secure supply of energy is a fundamental driver of economic growth in Africa. Around 580 million people, mostly from Sub-Saharan Africa, lacked access to electricity in 2018, and 900 million people had no access to clean cooking facilities such as natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas, electricity and biogas, or improved biomass cookstoves. Africa's human development is constrained by the access to reliable and modern forms of energy, and in particular to electricity. To support this rapidly evolving demand, it is of paramount importance to develop tools capable to simulate and optimize African energy systems and their interconnections.
Such tools are currently scarce, don't cover the whole African continent, and are not available under open licenses. This project aims at riding this gap with the development of two models for the continent.
Dispa-SET Africa
Dispa-SET is a unit commitment and optimal dispatch model with a high time resolution and geographical granularity. The purpose of Dispa-SET Africa model is twofold:
- to examine the current and future electricity situation together with the potential of power trading
between countries - to investigate the relationship between water and energy by analyzing the role of hydropower.
The model aims to refine previous studies, including the TEMBA model (The Electricity Model Base for Africa) with a higher temporal resolution (8760 time periods per year) and a more detailed description of the power fleet.
A detailed database has been constituted including demand and renewable generation time series, power fleet characteristics (at the level of the individual units), grid topology and fuel prices. The model allows simulating the current situation together with scenarios related e.g. to grid expansion as shown below.
The full dataset and the model source code are released under open licenses and are available on a dedicated Zeono repository.
Related publications
- Pavicevic, M., De Felice, M., Busch, S., Gonzalez, I.H., Quoilin, S. (2021). Water-energy nexus in African power pools-The Dispa-SET Africa model. ENERGY, 228, Art.No. ARTN 120623. doi: 10.1016/j.energy.2021.120623
- Pavičević, M., Quoilin, S. (2020). Modeling the Impact of Power Generation on the Water Sector in the North, Eastern and Central African Power Pools. In: PowerAfrica 2020 IEEE proceedings. Presented at the 2020 IEEE PES/IAS POWERAFRICA, Nairobi, Kenya, 25 Aug 2020-28 Aug 2020. ISBN: 978-1-7281-6746-6. doi: 10.1109/PowerAfrica49420.2020.9219883
- Pavičević, M., Quoilin, S., De Felice, M., Busch, M., Hidalgo Gonzalez, I. (Eds.) (2020). Analysis of the water-power nexus in the North, Eastern and Central African Power Pools. Report No. EUR 30310 EN, 1-96, Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. doi: 10.2760/12651
