A step to clean energy - Sustainability in energy system management in an emerging economy context
Graphical abstract
Introduction
Energy management has become a vital area of research due to increasing importance of conservation of energy resources and fossil fuels (Ng and Hernandez, 2016; Byravan et al., 2017). On a different note, approximately 80% of the global energy demand is still fulfilled by the fossil fuels, which is estimated to grow exponentially in the future (Parajuli et al., 2015; Child et al., 2018). In this sense, it is increasingly becoming important for policy makers to have sustainable development of energy systems in its usage and managing energy consumptions and energy demand related issues in emerging and emerged economies (Santoyo-Castelazo and Azapagic, 2014). To get to know the concept of sustainable development in energy systems, the energy development and management needs to meet the requirements of the current and upcoming generations (WCED, 1987; Shortall et al., 2015). Thus, it is crucial to understand the concept of sustainability in Energy System Development and Management (ESDM) to substitute energy from fossils with suitable sustainable energy sources (Bilgili and Ozturk, 2015; Kumar et al., 2017). Further, including sustainability in energy usage and energy systems management not only help to enhance energy consumption efficiency but also assist to recover the energy from waste using various advanced and innovative methods and processes in modern industrialisation. Electricity is the most significant form of energy for fulfilling the needs of industrial systems and improving the quality of human life (Szakonyi and Urpelainen, 2013; Al-Falahi et al., 2017; Sindhu et al., 2017). Besides this, different sources of renewable sources of energy such as hydropower plants, wind energy and solar plants may also be explored to fulfil the needs of society. Emerging economies such as India, Brazil, South Africa and China etc. seeking to explore a reliable and affordable source of energy to meet their economic growth. Hydropower plants are essential for the sustainable development of renewable energy resources (Kuriqi et al., 2017a, b). In most emerging economies such as India, there exists a large amount of hydropower potential. Since 2000, China is doing remarkably well in its hydropower growth and reaches to a hydropower capacity of 341 GW in 2017 (IHA Hydropower Status Report, 2018). Small Hydro Power (SHP) is one of the most cost-effective and environment friendly choices to generate electricity (Luthra et al., 2015a) and may be used for rural electrification in the emerging economies including India (Khan, 2015).
In energy systems, sustainability assessments generally seeks to provide an integrated understanding of aspects related to environment, economic, societal, security and safety, operational and technological conditions to make the society more responsible and sustainable (Proskuryakova, 2018). In order to access sustainability in ESDM, various sustainability indicators need to be explored and required subsequent analysis for exact information on various aspects of energy systems and performance management from a country perspective.
The energy requirement is more in emerging economies such as India, China, Brazil and South Africa is much higher than the developed countries (Bellos, 2018; Fernando et al., 2018). The population of India is growing at an exponential rate. In order to cater the needs of growing population, India’s energy consumption is also growing at a higher rate. Concurrently, India is meeting its most energy needs using coal and fossil fuel, which is environmentally unsustainable (Kanitkar et al., 2019). Furthermore, due to high emission into environment, the health issues related to air pollution are also raking up. In this sense, India is positioned at the 4th position in CO2 emissions in the world (Dawn et al., 2019). Currently, India is at crossroad because on the one had there is growing need of energy for economy to grow to meet the basic needs of the larger population. On the other hand, issues related to environment pollution are causing distress. India needs to provide access to reliable sources of energy in a sustainable way. In fact, the world moving away from non-renewable source of energy to renewable sources likes wind, solar, biogas etc. Tropical countries, including India, are richly endowed with these renewable sources (Sindhu et al., 2016; Sharma and Balachandra, 2018). Indian Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi, with his policies is aiming to give global recognition to the country as Innovation hub for renewable energy technology. This will further boost energy security, associated with reduced import dependence. Based on above discussed aspects, it is becoming increasingly important to conduct study to address sustainability in ESDM in India (Bhattacharyya, 2010; Srikanth, 2018).
Briefly, this work has three objectives, as follows:
- i.
To identify the indicators relevant to the effective sustainability assessment of ESDM;
- ii.
To understand causal interactions among the identified ESDM sustainability focused indicators; and
- iii.
To develop a research framework to organise the ESDM sustainability focused indicators for a practical applicability.
In order to meet above stated research objectives, firstly the extant literature for the topic proposed under study is explored. Later, the indicators are refined with the expert feedback to access their applicability in Indian context. Finally, Grey-DEMATEL (Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory) technique is used to explore the deeper casual interactions among the indicators. The listed indicators are further organised into cause and effect categories. This work combines grey approach with DEMATEL to incorporate the inherent uncertainty that exists due to lack of information and/or human bias.
The remaining work in this study is placed as: Section 2 illustrates the theoretical development of the study. The sustainability indicators are presented in section 3. The methodology along with framework of present investigation is proposed in section 4. An application part of this framework is covered in section 5. Section 6 is provided with the discussion and implications of the study. Section 7 comprises of the sensitivity analysis followed by section 8 with concluding remarks and limitations.
Section snippets
Theoretical background
Intensive literature review was performed using various key words e.g. Indicators/Drivers/Critical Factors/Metrics/Enablers/Variables and Sustainability Assessment and Energy Systems Management; Energy Systems Development, Planning and Management etc. for the collection of relevant data. In so doing, various databases including Emerald; ISI WoS; Science Direct; Taylor & Francis; Scopus; EBSCO; DOAJ; Inderscience and Wiley, were searched. Hence, this section contains the literature review on
Solution methodology
In this paper we have used grey based DEMATEL approach as solution method. The proposed research framework is provided in below Fig. 1.
DEMATEL can examine the inter-relationship between the factors (Gandhi et al., 2016; Terrapon-Pfaff et al., 2014). As compared to other decision making techniques, viz. ANP (Analytic Network Process), which is used to analyse criteria and alternatives that have very strong interactions and may also have a high effect in the decision making (Jharkharia and
Data analysis and results
The proposed framework was employed in Indian context. In order to analyse the issue; an expert panel of five experts was formed. Among five experts, two are senior project managers; one academician; one forest ministry environmental representative; and one statistics implementation and climate change allied representative. Luthra et al. (2018) used 5 experts in their research and suggested that more number of experts in Grey- DEMATEL may increase the data handling complexity. The individuals
Discussion of findings
The findings of this work are discussed with the expert panel to explore and understand the contemporary energy management and development hurdles encountered by them during the process. The findings further give valuable insights in understanding the different critical indicators, their causal interactions and the preferences in decisions of implementing ESDM.
Sensitivity analysis
Sensitivity analysis confirms the effectiveness of the pre-explained work. Different weights are assigned to experts for checking the consistency in the decision making process which in turn presents the variation in cause-effect.
To carry out the sensitivity analysis, all the five experts are weighted independently while keeping the weights identical for the other experts as shown in Table 8.
In run 1 for sensitivity analysis; Expert 1 is given highest weightage (0.4) and other experts are
Conclusions
This work seeks to enhance the performance of sustainability focused ESDM initiatives, in terms of (i) listing the indicators relevant to sustainability of ESDM; (ii) assessing the causal interactions of the indicators through cause and effect diagram using a grey-DEMATEL approach. The grey-DEMATEL is helpful in developing a structural framework of indicators that deals with uncertain situations, lack of information and human bias.
Based on the literature and expert inputs, this work offered 18
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