Prioritization of barriers to the development of renewable energy technologies in India using integrated Modified Delphi and AHP method

Abstract

India has many renewable and sustainable energy sources like solar, wind, hydro, biomass energy etc. In India, the renewable energy (RE) growth rate has not touched a benchmark due to various barriers in its development pathway. Yet, it is difficult to identify the severity of barriers that mostly hampers the growth of RE technologies. A systematic structure has been developed to prioritize the barriers and bridge the above gap. This study aims to recognize and rank the barriers as per their severe impact on the development of RE technologies. The study comprises three phases; (1) Barriers were recognized from the available literature studies, project reports, and interactions with eight experts from academia and industries. (2) For the final selection, “Modified Delphi” method was used. Then, twenty barriers were selected and categorized into five groups: social and economic barriers (SEB), policy andpolitical barriers (PPB), technical barriers (TB),administrative and market barriers (AMB) and geographical and environmental barriers (GEB) and (3) AHP method was used to get the priority weight and rank among these barriers. The results showed that the “PPB” ranks highest among the main category barriers. Sensitivity analysis is used to confirm the stability of all prioritized barriers. Various recommendations are suggested for the removal of these barriers, which augments the implementation of renewable energy.