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• The study depicts societal issues associated with the development projects. • A road map developed that focuses on avenues related to establishment of new development projects. • The SEETA model, based on Multi-Criteria Decision Making techniques is proposed. • Model is demonstrated using comparison of fourteen hydropower plants. • The hydropower plants are compared around five main and fifteen sub-criteria. Selecting an appropriate location for a large infrastructure project poses difficult situations. It shall satisfy sustainability indicators and establish harmony among multiple goals of multiple stakeholders. In such a situation, Multi-Criteria Decision Making techniques allow assessing qualitative and quantitative attributes, analysing and removing subjective biases and help in arriving at objective decisions. However, a single Multi-Criteria Decision Making technique may not be an effective tool to generate concrete results as there is no validation of the results. By utilising hybrid Multi-Criteria Decision Making methods, one can incorporate, gauge, and assess the range of social, economic, and environmental impacts precisely and achieve an accurate result by validating results by other methods. Therefore, this paper develops a model called as Social, Economic, Environmental and Technical Assessment model. It combines four fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision Making techniques viz. Fuzzy Stepwise Weighted Assessment Ratio Analysis, Fuzzy Multi-Objective Optimization by Ratio Analysis, Fuzzy Weighted Aggregated Sum Product Assessment and Fuzzy Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution. This paper utilises the case of hydropower plants in India, how the policy and decision-makers can arrive at the selection of the best location for an infrastructure project. According to the assessment value, Teesta Low Dam IV (Darjeeling, West Bengal) is the preferred hydropower plant for all selected methods. The State could bring social justice, ecological stability; achieve economic benefits and sustainability by appropriating this proposed model in other development fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coal-fired energy generation is the backbone of India's power sector and considered a driver of its economic development. However, it is associated with detrimental environmental and health impacts in India and its fleet is currently struggling with overcapacity and inefficiency problems. One solution to address these challenges is the early retirement of some of India's coal-fired power plants. In this paper, we introduce multidimensional indices that identify plants for retirement based on comprehensive criteria that include technical and economic characteristics of plants as well as their environmental impacts. We implement an ensemble approach, where we formulate 8008 indices based on all possible combination of seven relevant parameters and rank plants accordingly. This approach facilitates a comprehensive analysis of the plants' performance on different parameters and provides a new outlook on plant retirements that differs from the common approach of retiring plants based solely on technical characteristics such as age, capacity, and heat rate. Our results show that top plants recommended for early retirement are typically 7 years older, 13% more expensive and have around 40% higher population exposure to emissions compared to an average plant in India. We estimate the potential costs saved from the retirement of the worst-performing 50 GW of generating capacity to be $21 billion resulting from shifting ownership towards a cheaper cost of capital and replacing coal by more competitive sources such as solar power. • Identify plants for early retirement based on technical, economic and environmental indicators. • Worst performing 50 GW capacity are older, more expensive to operate and have higher population exposure. • Costs saved from retiring 50 GW capacity and replacing them with solar are $21 billion. • A multidimensional approach is essential for a politically feasible phaseout of coal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Voltage profile improvement in distribution network using Demand Side Management. • Cost and load shedding optimization. • Real and reactive power support from consumer batteries. • Analysis with realistic loading conditions under frequency linked pricing environment. Voltage stability improvement and load profile management remain the major concerns of the power system load serving entities. The evolution in demand side management technology with automatic control enables a large number of appliances including energy storage devices to provide efficient ancillary services for the distribution utilities. In this paper, a novel methodology is developed for residential consumers using battery energy storage systems as a key vehicle for centralized incentive based demand side management. The aim is to employ energy storage at end-users' premises to provide both active and reactive power support to the distribution utility so as to achieve the desired voltage stability margin at various network nodes while optimizing the deviation settlement charges under frequency linked pricing environment. The results indicate that the centrally controlled active and reactive power dispatch from the energy storage minimizes the load shedding required to bring the network node voltages within the operating limits and optimizes the costs involved. The demonstration is carried out on the IEEE-33 bus radial distribution system using the realistic loading data of a distribution utility in India. The proposed strategy could be of immense importance to the distribution utilities to optimize load curtailment and maximize their social welfare while operating under real time pricing environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]