Mauritania sits at the crossroads of North and West Africa, an enormous country of approximately one million square kilometres that is home to only about four to five million people. Roughly three-quarters of the country is Sahara Desert or semi-desert, and the population is concentrated almost entirely in three places: Nouakchott, the capital built almost from scratch after independence; Nouadhibou, the northern port city; and the southern Senegal River valley. Everything else is largely empty desert. That geographic reality is the central character of Mauritania’s electricity story.
This article traces how geography, institutional reform, regional hydropower, thermal generation, renewables, and emerging gas resources have shaped Mauritania’s electricity sector. It focuses not only on capacity and access, but also on the central question running through the country’s history: how can a sparsely populated desert state extend reliable and affordable electricity beyond its main urban centers?
The Colonial Baseline and Independence
France established control over Mauritania from around 1900, formalising the territory as part of French West Africa in 1904. Unlike Morocco, where France invested heavily in a settler economy, or Tunisia, where colonial infrastructure served established urban centres, French colonial policy in Mauritania was minimal.
From available data, only five towns had electricity as at 1960: Nouakchott, Nouadhibou, Rosso, Kaédi, and Atar. The economy was dominated by nomadic pastoralism, the capital Nouakchott was a new town, and technical and administrative capacity was almost entirely absent. The electricity sector it inherited was effectively nascent.
Founding Institutions and the Slow Build
At independence, electricity service in the five electrified towns was provided by the Gérance des Eaux (Water Management Authority). In 1965, that body was replaced by SAFELEC, which gave way to MAURELEC in 1969. In 1975, MAURELEC was consolidated into SONELEC—the Société Nationale d’Eau et d’Électricité—following a pattern seen across post-independence Africa of placing water and electricity under a single national utility.
This sequence of four operators in fifteen years reflects a period of institutional experimentation in a newly independent state with limited technical and administrative capacity. Political instability later added to these pressures: a military coup in 1978 overthrew the founding president, and subsequent governments pursued further reorganisations.
In 1978, a second power station was built in Nouakchott with Chinese technical assistance, an early example of what would later become a broader Chinese infrastructure presence in West Africa. By 1985, before electricity from Manantali became available, Mauritania’s installed capacity was reported at approximately 105 MW, serving only a handful of urban centres in a country the size of Egypt.
SONELEC’s financial difficulties led to a formal restructuring plan in 1985. Four years later, the Arafat thermal station was commissioned in Nouakchott, alongside a performance contract between SONELEC and the state. A project to electrify 13 towns followed in 1994 and was completed between 1995 and 1998.
This meant that a significant expansion beyond the five towns electrified at independence took roughly 35 years, reflecting the period’s fiscal constraints and governance challenges. By 1998, electricity production had reached approximately 152 million kWh, with thermal plants accounting for 80% and hydropower for 20%. Most commercial and industrial premises still relied on backup generators, a practice that has never fully disappeared.
In 2001, following a policy orientation toward liberalisation declared in 1998, SONELEC was split into two entities: SOMELEC (Société Mauritanienne d’Électricité) for electricity, and a separate water utility. The split was conceived as a precursor to liberalising electricity generation. In practice, liberalisation did not materialise: no credible private investor entered the market under a competitive framework, and SOMELEC remained the sole electricity company.
Yet Mauritania’s electricity development was not shaped by domestic institutions alone. As the national utility evolved, the country was also pursuing a regional solution to its limited domestic generation options through the shared development of the Senegal River basin.
The Manantali Dimension: Regional Cooperation as a Source of Power
Running alongside and, in some ways, more consequentially than the national institutional story, is the story of the Organisation pour la Mise en Valeur du Fleuve Sénégal (OMVS), the Senegal River Basin Development Authority. In 1972, the governments of Mali, Mauritania, and Senegal established the OMVS to develop the Senegal River’s agricultural, hydropower, and navigation potential jointly. This regional cooperation framework is one of the distinguishing features of Mauritania’s energy history. It is a multinational infrastructure project, with shared ownership, shared electricity allocation, and a 1,300-kilometre cross-border transmission network serving three national capitals.
Construction of the Manantali Dam in Mali on the Bafing River began in 1981 and was completed in 1987 at a total cost of approximately $500 million, creating a reservoir of 477 square kilometres. The hydropower component was not built at the same time: a second round of donor engagement and construction was required before electricity deliveries began in 2001.
During this period, the 1989 Mauritania–Senegal border conflict disrupted regional cooperation and project planning. Competition over land and water in the Senegal River valley formed part of the wider political context, although the conflict should not be attributed to the dam alone without stronger evidence. A project designed to strengthen regional cooperation was therefore developed amid serious regional tension. This shows that large infrastructure projects operate within and can alter the political economy of the regions they serve, sometimes in the ways their designers never intended.
The Manantali power station, with 200 MW of installed capacity, began producing electricity for all three countries in 2001. The allocation is fixed by treaty: Mali receives 52%, Senegal 33%, and Mauritania 15%. Mauritania’s 15% share translates to approximately 120 GWh annually from a dam producing an average 800 GWh per year. By 2006, Manantali supplied approximately 34% of Mauritania’s total electricity. A second Senegal River hydropower facility, the Félou plant (60 MW), was commissioned in 2013-2014, further increasing the OMVS system’s contribution. The Manantali connection remains operational today.
Early Renewables and the Limits of Progress
The two decades following SOMELEC’s creation saw the gradual introduction of renewable capacity, though at a scale that remained modest relative to demand. In 2011, a small 4.4 MW wind power station was commissioned at Nouadhibou, the first operational wind capacity in the country. In 2013, the Sheikh Zayed Solar Power Plant, a 15 MW facility in Nouakchott, was developed by Abu Dhabi’s Masdar and named after the UAE’s founding president, reflecting the Gulf-to-Africa development assistance model that financed early renewable infrastructure in several Sahelian states.
In 2014, additional thermal capacity was commissioned as Mauritania pursued plans to develop gas-fired generation linked to the offshore Banda field. Those gas-to-power plans were not realised at the time, however, and the field did not begin supplying fuel to the power sector. In 2015, a 30 MW wind farm in Nouakchott became the country’s largest renewable installation for several years.
National electricity access in 2015 stood at approximately 39.5%, with the overwhelming majority of that access concentrated in urban centres. In the same year, rural electrification was estimated at approximately 5%, meaning that roughly 95 of every 100 Mauritanians living outside towns and cities had no electricity at all.
Where supply exists, the cost per kilowatt-hour can be four to five times the SOMELEC social tariff for a 16-hour service day, creating a poverty trap in which people with the lowest incomes face the highest energy costs.
These early projects established wind and solar as credible parts of Mauritania’s generation mix, but they did not resolve the underlying access gap. The next phase therefore combined larger renewable projects with renewed interest in domestic gas, institutional reform, and export-oriented energy development.
The Boulenouar Wind Farm and the GTA Gas Field: A Country in Transition
Two developments in quick succession have begun to shift the landscape of Mauritania’s energy sector. The first is the Boulenouar Wind Power Station, commissioned in December 2022 and Mauritania’s largest renewable project to date. Boulenouar consists of 39 Siemens-Gamesa turbines with a combined capacity of 102 MW.
Owned by SOMELEC, it supplies the Nouadhibou grid and supports the mining operations that are central to the northern economy. By 2023, approximately 6% of Mauritania’s electricity was coming from wind, and Africa Energy Portal reported that renewables including hydropower accounted for approximately 44% of total power production that year — a meaningful shift from the thermal-dominated system of a decade earlier.
The second development has greater potential economic significance, although its direct contribution to Mauritania’s domestic electricity supply remains prospective. The Greater Tortue Ahmeyim (GTA) LNG project—jointly developed by Mauritania and Senegal, operated by BP, and supported by both countries’ national oil companies—began producing gas at the end of 2024. LNG exports to international markets followed in April 2025.
For now, GTA primarily serves the export market rather than Mauritania’s domestic power sector. However, the project framework provides for gas volumes to be made available to Mauritania and Senegal when domestic receiving infrastructure is ready.
A separate Banda gas development in southern Mauritania, with an exploration and production contract signed in March 2024 with the Taqa Arabia and Go Gas Holding consortium, is specifically intended for domestic industrial and power applications, but this too remains in early development.
Looking further ahead, Mauritania has adopted a Green Hydrogen Code in October 2024 and has been actively courting international investors in green hydrogen and ammonia production at the Mauritanides 2025 conference. The country’s resource combination of solar irradiance exceeding 2,800 kWh per square metre per year and strong Atlantic wind along its long coastline indeed position it among the more competitive potential future green hydrogen producers globally.
These ambitions are genuine and grounded in real resource advantages, but they are also a decade or more from material delivery. The institutional, commercial, and infrastructure conditions for industrial-scale green hydrogen export do not yet exist in Mauritania and should be understood as a long-term horizon rather than a near-term reality.
Institutional restructuring
On 16 January 2024, the government decreed the reorganisation of SOMELEC into Group SOMELEC, comprising a parent company and three subsidiaries responsible for production and transmission, distribution and commercialisation, and rural electrification. The reform preserves full state ownership while separating major functions. Its implementation, however, has taken longer than the formal decree suggests, and the timetable for completing the restructuring was subsequently extended. The change should therefore be presented as an ongoing institutional transition rather than a fully completed unbundling.
The most significant institutional reform since 2001, the restructuring is intended to enable private participation in electricity generation while the state retains control of the network.
As at 2023, National electricity access reached 50.3%, compared with 84.3% in urban areas. The persistent divide between urban and rural access remains the sector’s defining challenge.
Reflections and Lessons
- Geography requires a different electrification model. Mauritania’s electricity story begins with an exceptional physical constraint: a territory the size of Egypt, three-quarters of it desert, with only a few urban centres separated by hundreds of kilometres of sand. These conditions make a conventional path to universal grid access unrealistic. Recognizing this is not defeatism; it is the basis of a practical strategy in which distributed generation such as solar home systems, mini-grids, and off-grid diesel is treated not as a last resort, but as a primary approach to rural electrification.
- Institutional reform matters only when it changes sector performance. The sequence from 1960 to 2001—Gérance des Eaux, SAFELEC, MAURELEC, SONELEC, and SOMELEC—shows repeated restructuring without sustained development. Each transition appears to have reflected political change or financial stress more than a technological breakthrough or major access milestone. Renaming or reorganizing a utility does not by itself deliver electricity. The relevant test is whether reform is accompanied by investment, management capacity, and a regulatory framework capable of extending supply. In Mauritania, through most of this period, the answer was largely no.
- Regional cooperation delivers value, but requires lasting political commitment. The Manantali project shows both the strategic value and political fragility of shared infrastructure. Conceived in 1972, the dam did not begin supplying electricity until 2001—a 29-year delay caused by financing challenges, conflict between two of the three partner countries, and the difficulty of managing a shared asset across national borders. The electricity it provides is valuable, but the model depends on several governments sustaining cooperation over decades. Mauritania’s experience with the OMVS should therefore guide realistic expectations for future regional energy projects.
- Mauritania’s renewable ambitions, the Boulenouar wind farm, the Desert-to-Power programme, and the green hydrogen pipeline represent genuine potential and real recent progress. Even so, the gap between Mauritania’s resource endowment and current delivery remains vast. The broader lesson is that energy transitions require durable institutions, sustained political commitment, credible financing structures, and projects designed to expand reliable access as well as production.
Conclusion
Mauritania’s electricity history is therefore a story of gradual institutional development, valuable regional cooperation, expanding generation capacity, and an access gap that remains unresolved. Geography explains why conventional grid expansion is difficult, but it does not by itself explain the persistence of low rural access. The next phase will depend on whether Mauritania can combine stronger institutions, distributed rural solutions, regional interconnection, and disciplined use of gas and renewable-energy revenues. The central lesson is that abundant resources and new projects create opportunity, but durable access depends on implementation, financing, and sustained public priorities.
Some References
Africa Energy Portal (2024) ‘Mauritania’. Available at: https://africa-energy-portal.org/aep/country/mauritania (Accessed: July 2026).
African Development Bank (2020) ‘Desert-to-Power roadmap for Mauritania’, October. Available at: https://www.afdb.org/sites/default/files/2024/08/23/desert-to-power_dtp_mauritania_roadmap_en_oct2020.pdf (Accessed: July 2026).
Capmad.com (2025) ‘Energy crisis in Mali: paradox within OMVS’, 3 March. Available at: https://www.capmad.com/energy-en/energy-crisis-in-mali-paradox-within-omvs/ (Accessed: July 2026).
Climatescope (2022) ‘Mauritania’. Available at: https://2022.global-climatescope.org/markets/mr/ (Accessed: July 2026).
Energy Prof Substack (2026) ‘Mauritania: solar and wind boost a thriving African economy’, 19 February. Available at: https://energyprof.substack.com/p/mauritania-solar-and-wind-boost-a (Accessed: July 2026).
Enerdata (2025/2026) ‘Mauritania energy information’. Available at: https://www.enerdata.net/estore/energy-market/mauritania/ (Accessed: July 2026).
ICA Africa (2023) ‘Top 5 green energy projects to watch in Mauritania’. Available at: https://www.icafrica.org/en/knowledge-hub/article/top-5-green-energy-projects-to-watch-in-mauritania-369/ (Accessed: July 2026).
International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) (2015) ‘Renewables readiness assessment: Mauritania’. Abu Dhabi: IRENA. Available at: https://www.irena.org/-/media/Files/IRENA/RRA/Country-Report/IRENA_RRA_Mauritania_EN_2015.pdf (Accessed: July 2026).
This article is part of an independent historical research and writing series examining the development of electricity and power systems across African countries. It is compiled for educational purposes, to help readers understand where these energy sectors began, how they evolved, and what lessons might be drawn for the future. Mauritania is acknowledged as a country with thinner publicly available historical electricity documentation than other countries in this series.
