DR. WILLIAM GBONEY - AFUR

DR. WILLIAM GBONEY
Dr. William Gboney is an Energy and a Regulatory Economist with over 20 years combined
experience, in utility regulation and power plant operations. He possesses specialist skills in
econometric, financial modelling, tariff modelling, and application of empirical techniques for
performance benchmarking. William worked with the Volta River Authority in Ghana from 1987
to 1999, as a power plant engineer, during which he worked on a wide range of engineering
projects including the Akosombo and Kpong Hydroelectric retrofit projects. Between 1999 and
2006, he was the Director for Technical Operations & Regulatory Economics at the Public
Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) in Accra, Ghana. As the technical advisor to the
Commission, he made significant contributions towards developing the regulatory and tariff
frameworks there. He was responsible for undertaking technical, financial and economic
analysis of the electric and water utilities, and made tariff recommendations to the regulatory
Commission for approval. William was a key member of the team which developed the tariff and
financial models for the West African Gas Pipeline Project.
Currently, he is the Chief Executive of the International Institute of Infrastructural Economics &
Management (I3EM), based in Ghana. Since 2006, he has undertaken lots of studies for power
utilities. Some of these studies include inter alia, determining the efficient and cost-reflective
tariffs based on Long-run Marginal Cost, Tariff Impact Studies, use of Data Envelopment
Analysis (DEA) technique for cost and performance benchmarking. He was a member of the
Technical Assistance Team which recently carried out studies on Power Market Structure &
Model, and Analysis of Supply and Production Costs for ten pilot countries, for the African
Forum for Utility Regulators (AFUR).
William holds a B.Sc. (Mechanical Engineering), M.Sc. (Economic Regulation & Competition),
MBA (Finance) and PhD (Economics). He is a Member of Ghana Institution of Engineers
(MGhIE), a member of American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). He is also an
Associate Member of City University Centre for Competition and Regulatory Policy.
1

DR. ALBERT BANAL-ESTANOL
Dr. Albert Banal-Estanol is Senior Lecturer at the department of Economics at City University
(London), Assistant Professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), research fellow at
the SP-SP centre at the IESE Business School and visiting professor at the École du Pétrole et
des Moteurs (IFP School, Paris). Dr. Banal-Estanol holds an MSc in Mathematics and a PhD in
Economics from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Previously, he was Assistant
Professor at the University of Western Ontario in Canada and visiting lecturer at the University
of Cambridge. He also has been visiting scholar at UCL, London Business School, University of
Munich, among others.
Dr. Banal-Estanol is the programme director of the MSc in the Economic Regulation and
Competition at City University and a founding member of the Centre of the Centre for
Competition and Regulatory Policy. He is the author of several peer-reviewed articles published
in leading international journals and his research has been supported by public and private
grants (Royal Economic Society, ESRC, Gaz de France). He has taught a wide variety of
courses at all levels, in the UK, France, Canada and Spain. He has also delivered tailored
training courses in government agencies (Department of Trade and Industry, Ofgem, etc) and
private companies. Before finishing his PhD, he was a full time economic consultant and since
then he also been involved in several consultancy projects.
2

Neil Pinto
Neil Pinto is the CEO of PPA Energy. He has more than 30 years international experience of
work in the power sector, of which 18 years has been spent as a Director in a consultancy
company. He is a Chartered Engineer and is a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and
Technology (IET). Neil holds a Masters Degree in Engineering from Cambridge University. He
has focused on studies associated with the restructuring of power utilities, regulatory reviews,
assessment and analysis of new capacity requirements, assistance in the developmental
process for private power projects and the electricity pricing. Neil has extensive experience in
the management of multi-disciplinary teams. He has been resident in Africa and has an
excellent appreciation of the specific problems of the power sector in the region. He has also
worked extensively in Europe, Asia and South America. Neil has more recently been
increasingly involved in facilitation and training. He has run training courses in electricity
planning for oil majors and was responsible for a series of courses given to World Bank staff on
issues related to the power sector planning. Neil provided short term expert advice to the recent
Technical Advisory project for AFUR, and was involved in the presentations made in the
Gambia, Kenya and South Africa. In the middle of last year he ran a course for the Nile Basin
countries on electricity planning in the context of capacity shortages. Most recently in December
last year he ran a course for the East African Community in Kampala on Public Private
Partnerships in power. He has acted as a consultant for the World Bank and British
Government, on missions to Africa and the Far East. He is the author of a number of technical
papers, including a jointly authored paper which formed part of the World Bank Technical
Series. He has also been an expert witness in disputes associated with private power projects.
Neil has a good conversational level of French.
3