The African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD) has organised a series of specialised trainings to support the African power pools in enhancing their transmission network planning capacity. This is vital preparation for Africa’s Continental Master Plan (CMP) which is currently being developed under AUDA-NEPAD’s leadership.
The CMP is the blueprint of the African Single Electricity Market (AfSEM) and plays an integral part in analysing and solving Africa’s energy challenge. It links generation and transmission plans within and between the regional power pools and the AU Member States to identify Africa’s priority energy infrastructure. This will help to promote electricity trade between regions and reap economic and financial benefits of interconnections. Alongside partners like the EU Global Technical Assistance Facility for Sustainable Energy (EU-GTAF), IRENA and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), GET.transform supported advancing the continental grid capacity expansion planning under the CMP.
GET.transform provided training and sourcing of transmission planning software to AUDA-NEPAD and the five power pools CAPP, SAPP, EAPP, COMELEC and WAPP to conduct CMP transmission network studies. These help to identify the priority transmission interconnector infrastructure for the continental power system and analyse stability impacts of different renewable energy generation expansion scenarios.
In addition to enabling the expert trainings through Siemens and Energynautics, GET.transform also partners with AUDA-NEPAD, EU-GTAF and other development partners on technology specific support studies (SSS) to provide technology and cost development inputs into the CMP generation modelling process.
As a next step, the outstanding final training from the series will delve into advanced modelling aspects of variable renewable energy sources (vRE) and battery energy storage systems (BESS).
