Energy in Senegal

Following institutional reform in 1998, Senegal's electricity sector was split into three entities: Senelec, the national utility, the Agency for Rural Electrification (Agence Sénégalaise d'Electrification Rurale, ASER) and the Electricity Regulatory Board (Commission de Régulation au Secteur de l'Electricité, CRSE).

[5] The planned energy mix aims to help Senegal move away from oil dependence,[6] although newly discovered gas reserves offshore are expected to be used domestically to replace diesel and coal.

Senegal has remained only a marginal natural gas producer and most of its thermal electricity comes from diesel and heavy fuel oil (HFO).

[8] The government's ambition is to be able to feed most existing and future thermal stations with domestic natural gas from offshore fields discovered by bp and Kosmos Energy.

[3] Senegal's GDP growth was hindered in 2007 by frequent electricity outages, which caused a slowdown of the economic and manufacturing activities.

According to local reports, the outages have contributed to the closure of many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the food processing, textile, and tourism sectors.

[12] In addition, Senegal has embarked on an aggressive effort to produce significant quantities of biofuels, initially to run electricity generation units, and has a pilot project using sugarcane-based ethanol.