Côte d’Ivoire’s Electricity Challenge in 2050: Reconciling Economic Development and Climate Commitments

In closing its economic gap with emerging markets, Côte d’Ivoire will face a substantial increase in electricity demand over the next three decades. Côte d’Ivoire has signed the Paris Agreement that aims to achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources, including electricity, and absorption by sinks of green-house gases in the second half of the century. This paper develops a forward-looking tool to explore electricity technology investment paths compatible with both rapidly increasing electricity demand and the Paris Agreement. We build a TIMES model for Côte d’Ivoire and run scenarios with two sets of reasonable assumptions that represent two competing and probable visions of the future costs of coal and photovoltaic technologies.