| Climate Change provides renewed saliency to the Rural Energy Problematique, the daunting task of providing modern, sustainable energy services to the two billion people world-wide solely, or overwhelmingly reliant on subsistence biomass energy. The majority world poor are most vulnerable to adverse impacts of climate change and those least responsible for it. Furthermore, alleviating poverty requires addressing one of poverty's defining characteristics: chronic energy deprivation. Increased energy provision to the world's poor is not a development option, it is a basic necessity---but the choices made in how that energy is delivered will either exacerbate climate change or go to great lengths to mitigate it.; Simultaneously, sweeping changes are transforming the power sector. Vertically integrated power utilities are breaking up as successive waves of deregulation create new business opportunities for geographically dispersed independent power producers and distributors. The rediscovery of ecosystem and community-based approaches to rural development contribute powerful paradigms linking decentralized renewable energy to the opportunities created by power sector deregulation. Policy-makers have recognized this potential and in the case of India, for example, have enacted legislation to foster decentralized, community-based renewable energy systems. A key research gap, however, that this thesis addresses is that the system design tools appropriate to ecosystem-oriented rural energy planning do not yet exist.; This thesis develops a new ecosystem-based approach to rural energy systems design. Key components of this design approach, include; the use of complex adaptive systems theory to establish rural energy systems design principles; a human energetics model for examining the influence of bioenergy resource accessibility; and spatial optimization techniques for rural biomass energy planning. Applying these tools leads to a landscape focus for rural energy planning that links strongly to biodiversity conservation and traditional ecological knowledge. The design approach is then refined to include landscape structure optimization for biodiversity objectives using landscape ecology concepts, and subsequently multi-objective optimization of rural bioenergy systems based on accessibility, economic and landscape ecology considerations.; The landscape-scale bioenergy design tools are applied to a sub-region of the Shivalik Hills of Haryana, India known as the Morni Hills. The design tools are then generalized for regional-scale distributed renewable energy systems design with integrated bioenergy, wind and solar resource assessment. Illustrative applications from the Shivalik Hills region of India demonstrate the use of the tools, including the cost implications of landscape design, the influence of distributed wind generation and the implications of regional biomass constraints. |
