The Thaiba N’Diaye Onshore Wind Farm, Thiès, Senegal

IISD is working with the Senegalese government on making SAVi the preferred assessment methodology for sustainable infrastructure projects. IISD is collaborating with the Bureau Operationnel de Suivi (BOS), the monitoring agency of the Senegalese development plan “Plan Sénégal Emergent”. BOS monitors and assesses the contribution of 27 key infrastructure projects to the Senegalese development plan. SAVi has been used to provide assessments of two projects:

The Taiba N’Diaye wind farm has a capacity of 158.7 MW, and will generate around 400 GWh of electricity per year.  The project’s construction phase started in early 2019.

The SAVi assessment demonstrates that across environmental, social, economic and financial indicators, the wind farm performs better than Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) and coal-generated electricity. The assessment included a range of externalities, a simulation across climate-risk scenarios, and a comparison across energy technologies.

A SAVi assessment of a project’s viability takes into account these externalities, and compares that project with other energy technologies. The wind farm brings the highest net benefits, relative to the others assessed here. It generates a large amount of electricity in a cost-efficient manner, while reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions compared to coal or HFO. Over the lifecycle of the project, the wind farm also creates more jobs than either of the other technologies that we assessed.

The wind farm is also more resilient against the impacts of climate change: when global temperatures increase, the efficiency of a coal power plant drops significantly, as does its financial performance. The wind farm, on the contrary, is not as affected by global temperature increases, as the SAVi assessment shows.

The data for the SAVi assessments is generated based on the project data of the wind farm. The data for the comparison with other energy technologies is based on data adjusted for the Senegalese context. IISD customizes every SAVi assessment to build the model based on country-specific assumptions. BOS and CETUD validated the assumptions for each assessment. The full analysis of the project is available on request.

IISD will continue to work with BOS to make SAVi the preferred assessment methodology for helping deploy sustainable infrastructure projects in Senegal.