Home   |    Site Map    |   Contact us

Decision Support System for Decentralized Renewable Energy

In generic terms ‘Decision Support System (DSS) is a tool that facilitates the process of decision making by breaking down a complex problem into simple components.’

Development Alternatives with support from UNEP/GRID – Arendal has developed the current ‘Knowledge Base on Decentralized Renewable Energy (DRE) in India’. One of the key components of this is a ‘Decision Support System (DSS)’ on Decentralized Renewable Energy (DRE).

The DSS is an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) based tool and will provide need based information on technical, social, financial and environmental aspects of DRE technology options to help decision makers in taking informed decisions.

Components of DSS

  • Social
  • Technical
  • Financial
  • Environmental

The social component is evaluated through the ‘Social Assessment’ sheet. It helps the decision makers assess community readiness to set up the DRE plant and accordingly suggests different delivery models on DRE plants namely ‘Village level’ and ‘Group level’ DRE initiatives.

The technical component is evaluated through the ‘Resource Assessment’ and ‘Demand Estimation’ sheets. Resource assessment considers mainly two types of resources i.e. crop residue and wood collected by villagers and helps in supply side assessment. Demand Estimation helps us assess the current and future load demands of the villagers. Thus the technical component provides the technical details mainly the capacity of the DRE plant to be installed.

The financial component is inbuilt in the ‘Resource Assessment’ and ‘Demand Estimation’ sheets and it gives an estimate of the total installation cost of the DRE plant, the costs to be incurred after plant commissioning for five years (includes operation & maintenance costs, personnel costs, equipment & infrastructure costs and raw material costs) and a fund gap analysis.

The environmental component is also in built in the ‘Resource Assessment’ and ‘Demand Estimation’ sheets and gives the expected reduction in carbon emissions in kg CO2 per year (due to installation of DRE plant).

Target Groups

  • Communities (PRI members, Farmers etc)
  • Entrepreneurs
  • NGOs
  • Funding agencies
  • Policy makers

Applicability

The present version of DSS is a prototype i.e. has been designed for taking decisions only related to one technology (biomass based DRE solutions). It is well suited for DRE plants in semi arid regions of India and small scale DRE plants i.e. plants with a scale up to 1 MW as the assumptions have been taken for the same.

Way Forward

This is the first version and a prototype of the DSS tool and will be developed further to include more parameters in order to make it more robust.

If you have suggestions, ideas or inputs regarding the tool please write to us at smathur@devalt.org

    






          Design and Developed by Development Alternatives All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2010 | Devalt.org