Rural energy consumption patterns with multiple objectives

Abstract

The problem of designing a rural energy centre and thus obtain the emerging energy consumption patterns with multiple objectives, can be viewed as matching the various energy sources to cater fully to the energy needs of a wide variety of tasks such as cooking, lighting, ploughing, pumping water for irrigation, rural transport, etc. This, in fact, should satisfy several economic, technical as well as social objectives or goals. In order to arrive at a satisfactory solution, this has to be viewed as a multi-objective optimization problem. This communication develops a mathematical model for optimum energy planning in a rural environment. Goal programming approach is used in evolving a satisfactory solution to the above problem. The model developed is applied in the case of a typical South Indian village situated in a semi-arid region especially with respect to the major domestic energy needs of cooking and lighting. Results from the computer-simulated model are given.