Development and validation of novel methods for measuring and tracking clean energy transitions : case studies from rural India

Includes bibliographical references

PhD;2024;Management Studies

Modern energy sources are crucial to gain all the benefits that modern living affords and is central to our idea of holistic human development. While they pose multitude benefits over their traditional counterparts, they are also difficult to adopt owing to issues like their relative novelty, the need of more sophisticated technologies to use them, and their lack of availability in quantities and quality desired at an affordable price, among others. This is of concern as inhibitions in the use of modern fuels has dire implications on equitable human development when viewed across economic, social and gender divisions, and also encumbers our strategies to combat climate change. For this reason, encouraging households to transition to modern fuels faster has been an important policy agenda around the world since post-industrial revolution, and has taken a more urgent tone in recent years. Through our research, we aim to aid policy makers in this effort by offering a new insightful way to measure a household’s access to modern energy sources and a system-dynamic model to track/predict how they transition to using modern fuels. First, we developed a novel household energy access measurement methodology, named the Hierarchical Energy Access Framework (HEAF), which has been designed to be a holistic measure of energy access spanning across four avenues of energy use namely, household level services, community facilities, productive endeavours, and transportation. It does this through the use of simple but comprehensive set of indicators designed for each service dimension considered under each avenue of energy use. These indicators rate the household across four hierarchical set of grades and can be used as it is or be combined to form an overall numerical score and grade. A key advantage of this framework is that it is designed to be operationalizable using governmental/non-governmental data that is available in the public domain across the world. Next, we developed a new model, named the Household Energy Access Transition (HEAT)-cooking model, which is a bottom-up system-dynamics model that has been designed to track/map households’ energy choice for cooking in a disaggregate fashion. It incorporates a novel two-stage perceived inconvenience function that emulates how households are deterred from using traditional fuels despite their cost advantage. It also has a financial burden function that emulates the burden of using modern fuels as their cost impinges on the overall budget of the household. Finally, to validate and elucidate the framework and the model we apply them to the case of rural Indian households in the 2011-2021 timeframe. Using them, we were able to show that modern energy access in India was transitional in 2011 with an HEAF-index score of 4.22 out of 15. While a few improvements were made in energy access for cooking in the decade under consideration, COVID-19 pandemic played a major role in hindering modern fuel adoption. Overall, the policies enacted within the timeframe to promote LPG use were proven to be ineffective as no household was able to score an HEAF-cooking score of more than 1 out of 3 in 2021