IRENA-Swaziland Energy Planning Capacity-Building Programme: Scenario Building

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and the Kingdom of Swaziland’s ^[1] government held a two-week training course on strategic long-term energy planning in Manzini that focused on the use of SPLAT-SW, the System Planning Model for Swaziland .

The training course was part of the IRENA-Swaziland capacity building programme on strategic long-term energy planning. It built off the data preparation meeting in Swaziland in April 2016 and the MESSAGE software distance-learning in June 2016 that was provided at the courtesy of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The training course was led by IRENA experts and attended by energy planning professionals from the Ministry of Natural Resources and Energy, Swaziland Electricity Company, Swaziland Energy Regulatory Authority, and the Central Statistical Office that jointly constitute the national working team for the capacity building programme.

The training course agenda covered the following topics:

• Review of energy technology data and development of a reference energy database
• Techno-economic concepts behind a least-cost optimisation model
• Identification of renewable energy zones
• Analysis of renewable energy generation profiles
• Analysis of electricity load profiles
• Development of future energy policy scenarios using the SPLAT-SW model
• Identification and comparison of policy scenarios

On the final day of the training course, the national working team presented to the programme Steering Committee three energy demand pathways and preliminary results of eight energy supply scenarios formulated using SPLAT-SW model. The scenarios were defined to assess trajectories linked to critical energy policy issues in Swaziland, including planned coal power generation development, renewable energy targets, self-sufficiency of electricity generation and balanced development of hydro and biomass resources. The national working team also defined milestones for completion of scenario development and analysis, and developed an annotated outline for a national energy master plan.

The detailed agenda of the two-week training course can be found here.

The next two-week training course is scheduled for October 2016, with the aim of finalising the energy planning scenarios and the draft master plan document. 

See the IRENA-Swaziland Capacity-Building Programme.

_{[1] The Kingdom of Swaziland, now known as the Kingdom of Eswatini, officially changed its name on 19 April 2018.}