There are two facets to this. Firstly, many countries in West Africa are grappling with challenges in terms of energy access for large parts of their population - some countries have been doing well, other countries less so.

Now on top of that comes the added challenge of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and reducing air pollution to remain within the limits stipulated by the Paris Agreement to which West African countries are also signatory states. So, the question is really, can you support economic development on a large scale and can you support the industrialisation of countries using clean energy, in particular modern technologies like solar and wind power?

Historically, West African countries have made good use of hydropower, so the status quo in the past in West Africa has been mostly thermal power, from natural gas on one hand, and hydropower on the other. There is also further hydropower potential that could be exploited in the coming decades.

This potential is limited to river locations with large altitude differences and also by where it's ecologically feasible to build it, without having a big impact on the environment. In the past, this was something that wasn't considered to be a big concern, but now it is becoming more and more important.

Solar photovoltaic potential is present basically everywhere as the region has excellent solar power resources, very strong irradiation, especially in the north, but also in the southern countries like Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire.

Wind power potential is a lot more localised, but can have important roles to play in the future power mix. There's good potential, for example, along the coastline of Senegal, and in the Sahelian regions of Mali and Niger. All three of these resources would have important roles to play in the future of West Africa.

Now, this is quite an interesting question to look at from a scientific viewpoint, because the adequate, robust interconnected grids that exist in Europe, for example, were not designed for large quantities of renewables. They can absorb a certain amount of renewables, but they weren't designed to be based on a large-scale renewable power.

So, as countries in Europe move to higher and higher shares of solar and wind power, this comes with its own challenges. How do you adapt the grid to that new reality, but in many countries in West Africa, and elsewhere as well, grids have to be strengthened and reinforced anyway, just for reasons of electrification supporting economic development and supporting industrialisation.

That means countries in West Africa have a unique opportunity to design their future grids from the outset, based on the best possible ways of getting large amounts of solar and wind power on the grid. This is an opportunity to leapfrog the age of grids focused on fossil fuel plants, which other regions of the world have never had. That means you're going to need a lot of research on how best to harmonise these.

Hydropower has the reputation of being a stable and reliable resource. In West Africa especially, large hydropower projects with reservoirs are often the first go-to when shortfalls in power generation happen on the grid. Because these plants can react extremely fast, they can be dispatched to compensate for short-term disturbances or shortfalls in power generation, which means they could also be ideal complements to solar and wind power on both an hourly and a seasonal timescale.

For instance, solar power is obviously something you can only generate during daytime. If you combine that with hydropower, it means you could dispatch hydropower at night time and then reduce hydropower generation during daytime when there’s solar and save the water for later.

Our research has shown that if you see hydro, solar, and wind power not so much as resources on their own, but consider them really as a unit, this could have huge benefits for the grid. It can also reduce the reliance of some countries on hydropower by diversifying the power mixes, which has led to problems with droughts in the past.