West Africa’s electricity demand is rising faster than the region’s ability to transmit power, with officials warning that transmission shortfalls have now become the most dangerous choke point in the energy sector. At the 2025 West Africa Energy Conference in Accra, policymakers, regulators and investors stressed that without aggressive private-sector financing, national grids will fall behind industrial growth and undermine cross-border power-trade ambitions.
Ghana, which is recording annual demand increases of 300MW to 400MW, said the region must stop treating transmission as an afterthought. Benjamin Kingsford, Director of Procurement at the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCo), described transmission as “the defining constraint,” noting that weak network capacity hampers both domestic reliability and Ghana’s ability to export to Burkina Faso and Mali. He said Ghana is weighing new investment models that would allow private developers to bundle transmission lines with generation projects designed for regional markets.
Across the region, the scale of the infrastructure gap is stark. The ECOWAS Regional Electricity Regulatory Authority (ERERA) estimates that West Africa needs up to US$12 billion in priority transmission investments, but less than 20% of that has secured financing. The regulator is pushing for harmonised regional rules and cost-reflective tariffs to attract investors, pointing to its newly adopted 580-page market rulebook and an upcoming regional transmission tariff methodology as steps toward reducing regulatory fragmentation.
Nigeria’s power regulator highlighted severe congestion along the country’s northern and western corridors, underscoring how structural weaknesses disrupt both national supply and regional interconnections. The country is moving to establish an independent system operator and deploy digital systems that improve transparency in dispatch, settlement and tariff management. “Investors need visibility and certainty,” Friday Sule, Deputy Director at the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), said.
Private-sector players say investor appetite is growing but still held back by regulatory risks and unstable revenue frameworks. Gridworks Partners, known for financing private transmission lines in Uganda and Mozambique, said long-term availability-based payment models could be replicated in West Africa if governments strengthen contract enforcement and maintain tariff discipline.
Independent power producers echoed those concerns. Cenpower Generation, through its Chief Finance Officer Peter James, warned that poor transmission capacity exposes new generation projects to evacuation risks, which could deter developers and slow the region’s ability to absorb additional power or expand cross-border trade.
Officials cautioned that if transmission investment continues to lag, plans for a unified regional power market could stall, even as the West African Power Pool progresses toward permanent grid synchronisation. They stressed that coordinated public-private financing will be essential to meet rising demand, reduce system losses and support broader economic integration across West Africa.
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