Initial Studies of Power Plant Construction under a Deregulated West African Power Pool using System Dynamics

Our research group has been developing models to understand the long-term interactions between investment and performance in the electric power system. In this paper, we discuss some of our initial results in applying these tools to understand the expected pattern of investment in the proposed West African Power Pool (WAPP). The main result shows that the interconnection between countries has a clear impact on the local system prices and investments in new construction but there will still be large regional variations in prices and new construction.