Power planning in fragile and conflict-affected states

Traditional methods of energy planning are likely to provide results that may be inappropriate in fragile and conflict-affected countries. The risks of violence and damage, significant delays and cancellations in infrastructure projects, or projects coming in at very high cost, are rife in these states. Security issues can significantly hamper, or make infeasible, the delivery of power system plans. We look at how traditional power system planning and expansion models could be augmented to better consider the deep uncertainty associated with development in fragile contexts. We find that resilience aspects, combined with modular and incremental benefits of distributed generation technologies and systems, emerge as attractive options if the various risks of infrastructure development are included in modelling techniques. Investing in a diverse mix of supply types in the medium term and building a power system with redundancies or a higher share of local resources in the long term, is an effective approach to reduce vulnerability to conflict and socio-political fragility.