Sustainable assessment in energy planning and management in Indian perspective

Currently, energy systems are not fully sustainable due to the heavy power demands provoked by high population and increasing level of the living standard and economic growth. Hence, it requires significant efforts to conserve the resources and ensure the sustainability in energy demand and in its management from a nation perspective. The Indian economy is growing at a good pace and there is an enormous demand for resources and energy in the country. In this regard, this paper aims to identify and prioritize the indicators to develop a decision-support framework for the sustainability assessment in energy planning and management in Indian context. To achieve it, this work proposes to use a two-phase research methodology. In first phase, a comprehensive literature review and expert’s inputs are used to identify the important five key dimensions of indicators and twenty-five indicators for assessing the sustainability in energy planning and management. In second phase, fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used for prioritizing of indicators to develop an integrated sustainability assessment framework for energy systems. ‘Environmental’ indicator dimension has been reported as the most important dimension for assessing the sustainability in energy planning and management. The proposed decision framework may offer some valuable guidelines for policy makers to develop their plan of action in terms of design of both short term and long term flexible decision strategies, to assess the sustainability in energy systems. Sensitivity analysis has also been made to investigate the robustness and priority ranking stability of the proposed sustainability assessment framework.