African and Middle-East energy development — status of renewable energy projects, infrastructure, developments, and cross-border projects

The paper focuses on the present status and future prospect of electricity infrastructure in Africa and Middle East from the viewpoint of generation and transmission development, global deregulation trends and policies, advances in global research and development and strategies to influence integration into the global transition to knowledge based economies in Africa. The paper evaluates and updates models and policies that are near-term, mid-term and long-term. It is focused on projected development of regional power pools in Africa as a development strategy while taking into account the importance of distributed generation in this strategy. The paper presents some results of studies in this area at this time.