ABSTRACT

 The members ofthe Economic Community ofWestAfrica States (ECOWAS) have resolved to establish a well-functioning, cooperative, power pooling mechanism for West Africa known as the West African Power Pool (WAPP). WAPP is envisaged as a means to providing the citizen of the member states access to stable and reliable electricity at affordable costs. Pooling will achieve exchanges of reserve (generation) capacity among national power utilities and may involve three types ofservices, emergency supply at cost for a limited period, scheduled outages to be covered by supply from another power utility and a proportion of spinning (immediately available) reserve capacity. Such reserve capacity exchanges enable each of the participating national power utilities to achieve acceptable levels ofsystem supplywith lowerreserve capacity marginsthan with independent operation of each system in isolated mode. Economy energy exchange services, firm energy supply services and power wheeling services are all benefits of power pooling with its foreign exchange earnings. The overall objective is the synchronization of the West African Power Pool (WAPP) interconnected systems. This dissertation explores an evaluation of cross-border electricity pooling among some countries ofthe WestAfrican Power Pool. Understanding this power poolingwas achieve through an analysis ofvarious global electricity pool markets. In Europe, North America, South America, Asia and South Africa and work done by other researchers disclosed that none managed to successfully eliminate power shortages. Their situation is different from that ofthe West Africa Power Pool (WAPP). The apparent poor design as a regional power pool impacted negatively on power pooling within its region. Load frequency control and operational security were given priority. MATLAB M-File and PSSE power model were developed to determine the system overall stability and used to analyze the impact of power pooling of selected West African Countries Nigeria - Benin - Togo - Ghana. The results revealed that for WAPP its impacts depend mainly on its capacity and point of connection relative to a given load type, and load frequency control remains a major challenge. The evaluation identified that some generating plants were not frequency responsive and there were overload violations ranging from 100.5% to 216.2% in the network as admissible limits of components and ratings were not respected. Nigeria shows the frequency range set as ± 200MHz in which Af <200MHz is 26.7% and Af >200MHz is 73.3%. Ghana shows the frequency range set as ± 200MHz in which Af <200MHz is 75.4% and Af >200MHz is 24.6%. The correction oflow frequency control KPI to the reference frequency quality of 97% of time within the standard frequency range of ± 200MHz by Nigeria and Ghana will improve power supply by about 50%.