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With maturity of advanced technologies and urgent requirement for maintaining a healthy environment with reasonable price, India is moving towards a trend of generating electricity from renewable resources. Wind energy production, with its relatively safer and positive environmental characteristics, has evolved from a marginal activity into a multibillion dollar industry today. Wind energy power plants, also known as wind farms, comprise multiple wind turbines. Though there are several wind-mill clusters producing energy in different geographical locations across the world, evaluating their performance is a complex task and is an important focus for stakeholders. In this work an attempt is made to estimate the performance of wind clusters employing a multicriteria approach. Multiple factors that affect wind farm operations are analyzed by taking experts opinions, and a performance ranking of the wind farms is generated. The weights of the selection criteria are determined by pairwise comparison matrices of the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). The proposed methodology evaluates wind farm performance based on technical, economic, environmental, and sociological indicators. Both qualitative and quantitative parameters were considered. Empirical data were collected through questionnaire from the selected wind farms of Belagavi district in the Indian State of Karnataka. This proposed methodology is a useful tool for cluster analysis.

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Energy is at the heart of most critical economic, environmental and developmental issues facing the world today. Clean, efficient, affordable and reliable energy services are indispensable for global prosperity. Several local and global factors, including climate change, population increase and future energy security are the driving factors to the desire for universal access to renewable energy technologies. Social attitudes and lack of knowledge and awareness are major challenges to overcome, to successfully introduce low carbon technologies as a sustainable alternative to more traditional means of energy provision. This article presents a review of the status of rural electrification in India and decentralized renewable energy technology options. The work details different initiatives taken by the government of India for electrification of villages and steps taken to promote decentralized energy generation technologies. The study includes the results of a rural energy survey conducted in a typical village in the Indian state of Karnataka. It highlights the opportunities and attitudes of the rural communities towards sustainable modern energy services and the technologies used to deliver them. Results from the survey show that there is interest among the people in using sustainable or renewable technologies for energy provision. The findings suggest that, while selecting a fuel source, the most influencing factors are cost, reliability and ease of use. These factors score higher than environmental benefits and safety issues; hence, the focus should be on creating awareness among rural people about decentralized renewable energy technologies. These can be implemented locally by communities, Strategic Planning for Energy and the Environment 2015.35:41-72. 42Strategic Planning for Energy and the Environment making a significant overall contribution towards the national energy supply and environment protection.