East and Southern African countries possess vast potential for renewable energy development.

In the crucial years ahead, co-ordinated regional plans will play a vital role in scaling up the use of renewables for power generation, strengthening regional power supplies, meeting national climate commitments and ensuring energy security.

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) supports countries across East and Southern Africa in their endeavour to establish a regional transmission corridor for sustainable electricity, based specifically on renewable sources and technologies. IRENA’s Africa Clean Energy Corridor (ACEC) framework envisages a broad, North–South power transmission chain that encompasses 21 continental countries in the East African Power Pool (EAPP) and Southern African Power Pool (SAPP). The ACEC initiative, endorsed by Ministerial Communiqué in January 2014 during the Fourth IRENA Assembly, continues to guide regional co-ordination on renewable power development, energy sustainability and crossborder electricity trade.1 This report assesses the prospects for the power sector in the countries of the ACEC through 2040. As well as analysing the master plans of the two key power pools, it highlights sustainable, renewables-based alternatives based on IRENA’s latest dataset. The analysis supersedes earlier studies in the Planning and prospects for renewable energy series.

IRENA’s power sector planning tool, the System Planning Test (SPLAT) model, is applied to the two regional power pools, including their plans and prospects for capacity expansion. This quantitative model highlights each country’s leastcost supply options to 2040, taking operational constraints and resource potential into account.

With the capital costs for renewable-based power-generating technologies continuing to fall significantly, countries in the EAPP and SAPP have added roughly 40 gigawatts (GW) of new renewable power capacity since the last assessment in 2015. Subsequent analyses have combined the two power pools into a single SPLAT-ACEC model and incorporated these recent developments.