TITLE:
Electricity Demand Growth and Security of Supply in Côte d’Ivoire: Statistical Analysis for 2014-2025 and Scenarios to 2030
AUTHORS:
Kone Gbah, N’Guetta Akpagni Rene, N’Guessan Konan Felix Renato
KEYWORDS:
Electricity Demand, Security of Supply, Ivorian Power System, Trend Analysis, Energy Scenarios
JOURNAL NAME:
Energy and Power Engineering,
Vol.18 No.11,
November
5,
2026
ABSTRACT: Electricity demand is increasing rapidly in Côte d’Ivoire due to population growth, economic development, urbanization, and expanded access to power. While this growth supports the country’s development, it also puts additional pressure on generation capacity, transmission and distribution networks, and regional electricity exchanges. This work examines progress in electricity demand from 2014 to 2025 and provides projections through 2030. The study begins by assessing trends in the main indicators (electricity consumption, domestic generation, imports, export balance, customers number, distribution efficiency and average outage duration) by using three complementary methods: linear regression, the Mann-Kendall test, and Sen’s slope. Pearson, Spearman and partial correlations controlling for time are then used to give additional insight into the relationship among these variables. The results show that domestic electricity consumption nearly doubled between 2014 and 2025, increasing from 7333 to 14,635 GWh. This growth trend was statistically established, with a coefficient of determination of R2 = 0.956, a p-value below 0.001 and a Sen slope of 625 GWh/year. Furthermore, imports also increased significantly, while the net export balance decreased by approximately 101 GWh/year. The relationship between electricity consumption and imports remained strong and positive after controlling for the effect of time, with a partial correlation coefficient of r = 0.782 and a p-value of 0.0044, confirming that this association is statistically significant. In 2025, these imports reached 708 GWh, while total plant availability dropped to 79 percent, with a net balance of only about 90 GWh. Finally, three main scenarios project consumption between 18.7 and 21.5 TWh by 2030. Consequently, generation capacity, network infrastructure, and plant availability need to improve in line with growing electricity demand to reduce the risk of supply shortages and greater dependence on electricity imports. Although these findings do not represent a probabilistic adequacy assessment, they reveal consistent signs of a tightening supply demand balance and support the need of integration planning generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure, losses reduction, and regional interconnections.