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Top1. Introduction
Sustainable energy is the provision of energy that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs (WCED, 1987). The main goal of sustainable development is to explore ways to reduce the amount of energy used to produce a unit of economic output and to reduce related emissions. The concept of sustainable development generally encompasses three pillars: social, economical and environmental linked by government policies. Sustainable development demands environmental preservation and energy resource utilization and can be achieved through energy resource planning. Importance of sufficient energy services for meeting basic human needs, improving social welfare and achieving economic development are the main features of sustainable development. Sustainable development implies that modern energy carriers need to be made affordable to satisfy basic needs of rural.
Increased awareness of sustainable development issues is a major factor in support of renewable energy implementation and is a driving force for energy policy decision making (Haraksing, 2001). Efforts are being made to promote sustainable energy through increased energy efficiency and energy resource planning. Energy system must not overload the carrying capacity of ecosystem and use of energy resources should not compromise the ability of future generations to meet their energy service requirements.
Modern energy sources are neither available nor affordable to large sections of rural households. The lack of sufficient energy services in rural areas of developing countries causes environmental and health effects, many of these problems are due to more reliance on traditional fuel coupled with low energy efficient equipments. Most of rural people in developing countries still depend on bio-energy sources used in inefficient stoves for cooking and heating. Biomass fuels are mostly collected by women and children that lead to their maximum time spent and drudgery. Assessment and forecasting of the demand and supply of all forms of energy and associated problems arising form these necessitate the evaluation of options and energy planning. In addition, the environmental problems arising from increased energy consumption need to be considered while undertaking the energy plan. The energy action plan should be addressed to specific strategies and interventions, which are able to match demand and supply in the best possible way, considering associated constraints and factors (Deshmukh & Deshmukh, 2009).
Ever since the planning era started in India for developing the economy as a whole, application of technology has become an important factor of production with rapid depletion of traditional sources of energy like fuel wood, and crop residues which have also received increasing importance in recent years. Renewable energy sources like solar, wind, and biogas along with technologies like improved fuel efficient stoves, and pressure cookers are also being implemented at the micro level (Devadas, 2001).
The concept of goal programming (GP) was first introduced by Charnes and Cooper (1963). Thereafter, GP has been widely discussed (Hannan & Deistler, 1987) and applied technique (Jones, Mirrazavi, & Tamiz, 2002) for solving decision problems with multiple criteria. In classical GP models, unwanted deviations from target values defined by the decision maker are minimized in order to reach an acceptable solution. The unwanted deviations are measured using positive and negative deviation variables that are defined for each goal and they represent overachievement and underachievement of the goal, respectively. Recently, some extensions, which are formed by hybridizing approaches in order to obtain more general achievement function structures, have been proposed (Romero, 1986). However, from the modeling goal priorities point of view, weighted GP and preemptive priorities GP have been the two most widely used approaches (Slowinski, 1986).