Regional Coordination of Electricity Pricing, Cross-Border Interconnection and Shared Storage for the West African Power Pool

Abstract

National electricity-planning frameworks are increasingly constrained by their inability to internalise cross-border complementarities in renewable resources, demand profiles and flexibility needs. This paper evaluates whether a regionally coordinated dynamic-pricing mechanism, combined with cross-border interconnection and shared energy storage, can improve the economic and environmental performance of an interconnected power system in West Africa. A multi-period, multi-country optimisation framework is formulated for five ECOWAS member states (Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, The Gambia and Guinea) and applied to three configurations: an isolated national system, a statically priced regional interconnection, and a fully coordinated regional system combining dynamic pricing with shared storage. Because each configuration relaxes the decision space of the previous one, a monotonic cost improvement is expected by construction, so results are read as evidence on the magnitude of that improvement rather than as an independent test of each mechanism. Within this scope, the coordinated configuration reaches, by 2050, an average cost of 45.86 FCFA/kWh and a renewable share of 68.46% without modelled subsidies. A central finding, less directly implied by the scenario structure, is that these gains are not accompanied by larger cross-border flows: exchange volumes fall from roughly 5,000 MWh/day under static interconnection to about 850 MWh/day once shared storage is activated, indicating that temporal flexibility can substitute, in part, for spatial flexibility. Thermal emissions are also lower than under static interconnection, though not comparable to the isolated case owing to differing system boundaries. As the storage and pricing mechanisms have not yet been decomposed and no sensitivity analysis has been run, these results are exploratory rather than confirmatory. With that caveat, they support treating regional electricity pricing as a coordination instrument for interconnection and storage policy, discussed alongside the institutional conditions - harmonised rules, transparent burden-sharing, and consumer protection - required within the WAPP/EEEOA framework.