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ECOWAS Status Report

RENEWABLE ENERGY AND ENERGY EFFICIENCY STATUS REPORT 2014 | 13 seasonal output from hydropower plants, and supply disruption. Despite fossil fuel extraction being an important economic factor in specific ECOWAS countries—including Ghana and Nigeria—all but two Member States are net importers of refined petroleum products. Reliance on traditional biomass has resulted in significant deforestation in several Member States. The region’s energy sector has also had significant impacts on human health and the environment. Reliance on traditional biomass and solid fuels for cooking and heating has led to more than 257.8 million people being affected by household air pollution from indoor smoke, small particle pollution, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen oxides. Other injuries—particularly burns—pose significant threats. Collecting these resources also exposes women—mostly in rural areas—to the risk of injury, rape, or harassment, and limits the time available for education, commercial activities, or leisure. In Member States that extract fossil fuels, negative environmental impacts on air, soil, and water have been widely reported. Projected climate change impacts in the region are significant, and will likely affect energy supply. For example, more variable rainfall could make dependence on hydropower increasingly costly and unreliable, highlighting the need to diversify energy supply and consider climate resilience in energy planning. In the coming years, rising energy demand fuelled by population growth, rapid urbanisation, and economic development will place additional strain on the region’s energy system. By harnessing the region’s tremendous renewable energy potential across a diverse set of resources, including modern biomass, hydropower, solar, and wind, ECOWAS Member States have already begun to address these challenges. RENEWABLE ENERGY MARKET AND INDUSTRY OVERVIEW Cooking accounts for a large share of regional energy use. An average 85.7% of each Member State’s population currently uses solid fuels (predominantly wood and charcoal) for cooking, with national figures ranging from 98% in Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, and Sierra Leone, to 31% in Cabo Verde. Efficient cook stoves, gas, and electricity represent opportunities to expand access to clean cooking fuels. Although data on clean cook stove penetration in the region is limited, it is estimated that significant shares of the populations in Sierra Leone (10%), Senegal (16%), and the Gambia (20%) are using improved biomass cook stoves. Cabo Verde and Senegal exhibit particularly widespread use of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) which, although not renewable, has significant environmental and health benefits over wood and charcoal. Very few ECOWAS inhabitants rely on electricity for cooking, which remains expensive and unavailable in many parts of the region. Renewable energy technologies play an increasingly important role in power generation. Although hydropower has been used throughout the region for many decades, deployment of non- hydro renewables—including wind, solar, and biomass—is accelerating. Within ECOWAS, electricity has traditionally been provided through conventional grid systems. As of mid-2014, an estimated 4.8 gigwatts (GW) of grid-connected renewable installed capacity (39 megawatts (MW) exists in the region, accounting for approximately 28% of the region’s total installed capacity. Increasingly, however, regional electricity grids face considerable challenges including high expansion costs, aging infrastructure, and vulnerability to the impacts of climate change. Moving forward, renewable mini-grids and stand-alone systems have been identified as important tools to achieve the region’s energy goals. Hydropower is the region’s most well established and widely used renewable energy technology and remains the only renewable technology deployed on a commercial scale in many Member States. With only 19% of the region’s estimated 25 GW of hydropower potential exploited to date, significant opportunities for expansion remain. While the region has historically targeted large, rather than small or medium-sized hydropower projects, interest in small hydropower development has increased, with numerous projects now under way across the region.ii As of 2014, two ECOWAS member states have over 1 GW of hydropower capacity. Nigeria is the regional leader with just under 2 GW installed, followed by Ghana with a total of 1.6 GW. Additional hydropower capacity is installed in Côte d’Ivoire (604 MW), Mali (300 MW), Guinea (126.8 MW), Togo (65.6 MW), Sierra Leone (56 MW), Burkina Faso (29 MW), Liberia (4.6 MW), and Benin (2 MW). As of early-2014, a total of 27 MW of wind power had been installed in ECOWAS. Most of the region’s wind capacity is located in Cabo Verde, where the 25.5 MW Cabeolica wind farm became sub-Saharan Africa’s first commercial-scale, public-private partnership (PPP) wind project when it was inaugurated in 2011. Additional grid-connected wind power has been developed in the Gambia, and several new projects are scheduled to come online in Senegal and Togo. Member States have demonstrated a growing interest in grid- connected and large-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) projects. Cabo Verde is the regional leader in solar PV, with two solar farms totalling 6.4 MW. Ghana’s 1.9 MW solar PV installation, slated for expansion to 2.5 MW, is the largest grid-connected solar project outside of Cabo Verde and several additional PV plants are scheduled to come online in Ghana by the end of 2015. To date, however, the region’s use of solar PV remains concentrated in distributed and off-grid functions. Although estimates of total installed solar PV capacity are unreliable, as few Member States collect data on self-generation or off-grid projects, assorted estimates for Guinea-Bissau (3 MW), Ghana (3.2 MW), Niger (4 MW), Nigeria (20 MW), and Senegal (21 MW), indicate widespread use of the technology throughout the region. ii. Although definitions of small-scale hydropower differ by Member State, the ECOWAS definition is between 1 and 30 MW. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

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