A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Engineering, School of Environment, Resources and Development

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 1998

Strong energy-economy interactions in developing countries are often ignored by energy planners in constructing energy demand and environmental scenarios because of the complexity in using energy models to carry out the proper analyses. Consequently, the projected energy demand and environmental scenarios, after passing through lengthy and expensive planning processes, in many cases, result in unreasonable investments which distort the national macro-economic scenarios. To help energy planners in working more efficiently with energy demand and environmental scenario construction, a general methodology is proposed for investigating energy environment-economy interactions in developing countries. This general methodology, which supposed to comprise several sub-modules in a single framework, spells out the general procedures and steps to build energy demand and environmental scenarios in solid consistency with national macro-economic scenarios. Expert systems are proposed to simplify the planners' works in carrying out the analyses. An application of the proposed general methodology for validating energy demand and environmental scenarios (in terms of consistency with national macro-economic scenarios) has also been implemented. This application is a computer package comprising an energy demand module, a macro-economic module and an energy supply module. The environmental impact assessments can be performed in both energy demand and energy supply modules. In this application, a techno-economic energy module is selected for the energy demand module. The macro-economic module is represented by an expert system developed for macro-economic scenario generation using very simple growth approach. The energy supply module is filled up by a non-optimization energy supply planning system. A knowledge-based support system for the energy demand module has also been developed for evaluating the "most difficult" variables. Consistency between energy demand and environmental scenarios and national macro-economic scenarios are obtained through investigation of the relationship between energy investments/ imports, environmental costs and the balance of payment. The impacts on aggregate growth and on sectoral compositions in the macro-economic scenarios are also investigated. A case study of Vietnam shows that the initially projected energy demand and environmental scenarios are subject to significant changes in order to maintain consistency with the national macro-economic development. The results show that the newly developed application operates successfully and can be an effective tool for energy planners in developing countries. Additional test of the macro-economic module indicates that this expert system can be a useful tool for energy planners in developing countries for carrying out macro-economic analysis in the energy planning exercise.