To Identify Descriptive Renewable Energy Policy Elements with Special Emphasis to the Renewable Energy Sector

Abstract

Renewable energy (RE) policy in India is shaped by a large and fragmented body of global, national and state-level policy statements drawn from government documents, international agency reports and academic literature. This paper reports a structured, expert-consensus based study undertaken to identify and prioritise descriptive renewable energy policy elements for India's Renewable Energy System, with special emphasis on the renewable energy sector. Using the Nominal Group Technique (NGT), a three-phase process was followed. In Phase-I, a core group of four domain experts (drawn from a pre-identified panel of fifteen academicians, policy planners and industry/government specialists) compiled an initial working paper of 763 descriptive policy statements collated, edited and merged from secondary sources including the International Energy Agency (IEA), the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE), together with policy documents of major Asian, Middle-Eastern and Western economies. In Phase-II, twelve domain experts reviewed, clarified and merged these statements into 258 descriptive policy elements, which were then keyworded and classified into nine policy dimensions: Administration & Organization (A&O), Life Quality Improvement (LQI), Employability, Training & Education (ET&E), Sustainability, Public-Private Partnership (PPP), Demand Side Management (DSM), Economic Growth (EG), Research & Development (R&D), and Inter & Intra-State Regulation (I&IR). In Phase-III, a weighted ranking exercise among ten domain experts reduced the 258 elements to a final prioritised set of 34 core policy elements (coded P1-P34). Administration & Organization emerged as the most heavily weighted dimension (52 elements, weight 9, Rank I), while Demand Side Management, though narrowly represented (14 elements), was assigned the lowest aggregate weight. The findings offer a compact, evidence-based and expert-validated framework that policymakers, regulators and renewable energy planners in India can use to prioritise interventions across administrative, economic, technological and regulatory dimensions of the renewable energy sector.