The 4th General Assembly of the West African Power Pool (WAPP) is scheduled to be held from the 26th to the 29th of October 2009. The meeting will be held on the theme: “Growing and looking forward to energy sufficiency in West Africa”.
A Deputy Chief Executive Officer of the Volta River Authority (VRA), Ing Kirk Koffie, who made these known at a news conference in Accra, yesterday, traced the establishment of the WAPP to 1999 with its Secretariat based in Cotonou, Benin and headed by a Secretary- General.
Ing Koffie said the WAPP is an institution of ECOWAS Sprouting from the ECOWAS Protocol to establish a Regional Electricity Market and to promote regional investment for power production and the interconnection of networks.
He said the vision of ECOWAS is to develop and put in place the West Africa Power Pool as a co-operative power pooling mechanism for integrating national power system operations into a unified regional electricity market.
This vision, Ing Koffie said, was borne out of the realisation that few people in the West Africa sub-region have access to electricity to meet the needs of the population, that despite the region’s large energy endowment, the region’s per capital consumption of electricity is among the lowest in the world and that the efforts to achieve national self-sufficiency in electricity supply have been inadequate due to the high cost of establishing power generation and transmission infrastructure.
WAPP was, therefore, established to promote power systems infrastructure development in West Africa and develop an integrated and sustainable, but yet to be tapped hydro resources of Guinea and an expansion of gas-fired power generation, leveraging the communities parallel track strategy to expand access to Nigeria’s enormous natural gas reserves.
It was also the objective of WAPP to, over the medium to long term, assure the citizens in the sub-region of a stable and reliable electricity supply at affordable costs and facilitate a four-fold increase in power system interconnection capacity among ECOWAS member states over the period 2005-2020.
