Energy access and renewables in Libya: CESI with GECOL and Eni

Since 2019, the General Electricity Company of Libya (GECOL) has been involved in various initiatives that aim to reinforce and enhance the Libyan power sector , with the base target to ensure an effective access to energy to the Libyan communities and to provide clean, renewable energy to such communities.

Several activities undertaken by GECOL have been carried out with the support of CESI and Eni North Africa , as it was mentioned in the paper Important steps and policies toward GECOL’s vision and objectives for a secure and reliable Libyan power system , recently presented at the 10 ^th CIGRE Southern Africa Regional Conference .

Upon the political and military conflicts that took place in Libya since 2011, the country’s power sector needed actions to recover generating units and maintain damaged transmission system , while also including efficient deployment of the huge potentials of renewable energy sources. Therefore, GECOL, Eni North Africa and CESI worked on a three-fold objective: system modelling, regulatory aspects and renewable energy integration .

Thanks to CESI and Eni involvement in the activities, GECOL has currently fulfilled its main target to publish in early 2021, for the first time in its history, the National Grid Code that includes connection code, transmission planning code, operation code, scheduling and dispatch code, data and information exchange code and the metering code.

Moreover, GECOL has successfully endorsed an integrated static and dynamic model of the High voltage transmission network, which allows to address the recent changes in the network infrastructure and plan properly the inclusion of any new assets to the system. A practical example of the fruitful usage of the new model is the verification of the integration of Renewable Energy Resources into the grid, that has been firstly elaborated by GECOL in the industrial area of Zliten for a solar park up to 250 MVA installed capacity.

This initiative runs in the direction of the “ go-to-green ” strategy that GECOL is willing to lead for the benefit of the Libyan country.

You can read the full paper at this link .