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• Analyzes South Asia's energy trilemma balancing energy access, security and sustainability. • Focuses on four major regional countries: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. • Identifies major challenges as lack of energy access, unreliable gird, and unaffordable prices. • Explores the prospects of renewable energy as the key toward a sustainable energy transition. • Presents stakeholder perspectives on crucial dynamics of energy transition. To address the faced challenges – i.e. rapidly growing energy needs, depleting fossil fuel reserves, surging energy prices, risks to security of supplies, and climate change – the World is targeting a sustainable energy transition. This energy transition is primarily propelled by a global decarbonization drive. South Asia, a developing region housing over 23% of the global population, faces the additional challenge of serious energy deprivation. The subject of energy transition has not been explored in the South Asian context in terms of drivers, challenges, and prospects. This paper investigates the prospects of sustainable energy transition in South Asia in terms of resources, consumption trends, and challenges encountered by countries in the region, particularly India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. It also examines the sustainable and renewable energy options for the region. An original stakeholder survey provides salient behavioral insights into awareness, attitudes and opinions shaping societal response to energy transition. The findings of the study highlight the serious energy security issues faced by the region in terms of lack of access, inconsistent supplies, unreliable grids, and high energy prices. Renewables like solar energy, wind power, and hydropower have the potential to propel regional countries to energy and environmental sustainability. "Lack of consistent policies and regulations", "lack of political will" and "lack of investment" are found to be the three most important challenges to the energy transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decades, forecasting electricity demand has been crucial in energy planning and power distribution management to establish sustainable strategies in undeveloped countries. This work proposes an integrated approach to evaluate Pakistan's energy sector and holistically investigate electricity-load strategies to prioritize them and prevent future electricity crises. This paper proposes a renewable energy technologies-based system design to eliminate energy shortfalls. Deep learning models can predict fluctuating variation in energy consumption, crucial for designing renewable energy systems. The strengths – weaknesses – opportunities, and threats (SWOT) analysis identified relevant factors and sub-factors, while the fuzzy-TOPSIS methodology prioritized alternative strategies. The results show that driving the nation to the functionality of an energy hub by sufficiently using its geostrategic location within the regional cooperation framework is the critical dominant factor. Besides, improving the country's investment environment was the least favored priority. Baluchistan was found to have the highest potential for wind energy, with an ability to generate 3270 MWh/year through wind power. [Display omitted] • An integrated management approach is proposed to address electricity crisis. • The proposed strategical energy forecast and planning is studied for Pakistan. • Prioritize the indicated strategies for sustainable energy planning and development. • Turning the country into renewable energy hub is suitable for Pakistan's economy. • Baluchistan has the potential to generate 3270 MW power from wind power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The outcome of COP15, the conference on climate change in Copenhagen, was the Copenhagen Accord which was recognised by the 193 countries that attended. The Accord set no compulsory limits on carbon emissions, and none of the countries that introduced it – USA, China, India [with Brazil and South Africa] – has signed the Annexe to the Kyoto Agreement, committing them to limit their emissions. Climate change is only of secondary importance to them compared with eradicating poverty. Nevertheless three of these countries are in the lead currently for installing renewables, far ahead of most of those [only 37 out of 187 countries world-wide] who are committed to limiting their emissions. This paper explains why. The main function of renewable energy is to save fuel, thereby reducing energy imports and maintaining security of energy supplies without the need to fight world wars over them. Also, being capital intensive with all the money paid up-front, renewables avoid the price fluctuations that bedevil the oil and other fossil fuel industries. As capacity is doubling every 3 years, renewables prices will come down with savings of scale, so wind power in particular will soon be the cheapest form of power. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]