Can electricity demand lead to air pollution? A spatio-temporal analysis of electricity demand with climatic conditions

Abstract

Abstract India, the third largest electricity producer, has been suffering from high power deficit for the past few decades. In recent years, the Government of India (GOI) has taken several initiatives to provide uninterrupted energy availability to citizens. The proposed study is aimed to help Indian government and private agencies in proactive planning of various energy related activities including spatial resolved generation planning, timestamp activities planning, transmission network optimization and many more. In this context, the article delivers details about the performed Spatio-temporal analysis of energy availability/deficiency in the country, India. Furthermore, as a step towards overall electrification, the Indian government had launched the Saubhagya scheme (2017) to provide reliable and accelerated electricity access to un-electrified rural and urban households. The analytical assessment of citizens views on such policies is beneficial for the government agencies to decide future spatial movement and resources planning. Hence, this study, later on, delivers a novel insight in the energy domain by examining citizens views through Twitter-based regional analysis. This analysis gives inference regarding citizens’ sentiments on policies or electrification status published by GOI. Here, the presented work showed that citizens from four out of the five regions express positive opinions on electrification progress made by GOI. In the last stage, the impact of increasing electricity demand and climate changes on air pollution of a city is examined using the Granger causality test. The test experiments are performed on the well-planned northern city, Chandigarh. Although many researchers have explored the association between the climatic conditions and the energy demand, in this work, along with these factors, the causal interaction with air pollution is also shown.