Sector Planning

As Armenia expanded its renewable energy ambitions, the Government needed to understand whether the country’s transmission and distribution system could accommodate significantly higher levels of solar and other variable renewable generation. Different renewable development pathways would create different impacts on power flows, congestion, system stability, and network investment requirements, particularly across infrastructure that had not been designed for high renewable penetration. The World Bank hired DHInfrastructure to assess the system implications of alternative renewable energy scenarios and identify the network reinforcements required to support them.

DHInfrastructure directed a technical assessment of the implications of variable renewable energy integration for Armenia's power system, coordinating a team of power system engineers. We conducted load flow analysis at 400, 220, and 110 kV levels to assess how different levels of renewable energy capacity would affect power flows across the transmission and distribution network, identifying bottlenecks where congestion or stability issues would emerge under higher renewable penetration scenarios. Based on this analysis, we recommended the specific network reinforcements needed to accommodate the assumed renewable energy capacities and estimated the cost of those reinforcements. We also conducted sensitivity analysis across a range of renewable energy development scenarios—from the World Bank's least-cost plan to a more aggressive renewable energy pathway—giving the Government a clear picture of how investment requirements and system implications would vary depending on the pace and scale of renewable deployment. The result was a technically grounded assessment that directly informed Armenia's renewable energy planning and the transmission investments needed to support it.

The Cook Islands needed to update its National Infrastructure Investment Plan (NIIP) to reflect changing development priorities, post-COVID economic conditions, and growing climate resilience needs. The Government and development partners faced difficult decisions about how to prioritize infrastructure investments across energy, transport, water, solid waste, and other sectors while ensuring that proposed projects could realistically be financed and implemented within the country’s fiscal and institutional constraints. The Pacific Region Infrastructure Facility sought a revised investment plan that would provide a credible roadmap for sequencing infrastructure development and aligning it with available public, donor, climate, and private financing. The Asian Development Bank hired DHInfrastructure to lead that work.

DHInfrastructure reviewed the existing NIIP alongside country development strategies, investment programs, and sector plans to assess the demand for infrastructure services across each sector. We analyzed alignment with development partner strategies and long-term planning considerations, and assessed the implications of post-COVID economic recovery and climate resilience for investment priorities, incorporating the potential for climate finance and private sector participation where relevant. Based on this analysis, we updated the NIIP to reflect current priorities and developed a funding strategy that assessed the capital and recurrent costs of proposed investments against available financing sources, ensuring that the plan was not just analytically sound but financially feasible. The result was an updated investment plan that gave the Government of the Cook Islands a clear, prioritized roadmap for infrastructure development across multiple sectors, grounded in a realistic assessment of what could actually be financed and implemented.

Georgia faced important decisions about how to meet growing electricity demand over the coming decades. The country had significant untapped hydropower potential, but large reservoir projects carried environmental and social costs; gas generation offered flexibility but exposed the system to fuel price risk; renewables were increasingly cost-competitive but introduced variability; and imports offered an alternative to domestic investment but raised energy security concerns. With multiple supply options available, each with different cost profiles, risk characteristics, and implications for end-user tariffs, the Government needed a rigorous analytical basis for its generation planning decisions. The World Bank hired DHInfrastructure to develop that analysis.

DHInfrastructure developed an electricity demand model and prepared base-case demand scenarios to establish the supply-demand gap that new investment would need to fill. We then assessed a range of supply portfolio options—combining hydropower, natural gas, renewables, energy efficiency, and imports in different configurations—and used our in-house dispatch optimization model to simulate how each portfolio would perform under real operating conditions. We calculated the long-run average incremental cost of each option and conducted sensitivity analysis across different demand trajectories, gas price assumptions, and financing scenarios, testing the robustness of the least-cost conclusions against key uncertainties. Finally, we estimated the end-user tariff impact of the least-cost plan, giving the Government a clear picture of what its generation investment choices would mean for consumers. The result was a comprehensive, quantified basis for Georgia's power supply planning decisions that integrated technical, economic, and financial analysis into a single coherent framework.