Performance evaluation of Indian states in the renewable energy sector for making investment decisions: A managerial perspective

The paper provides a complete and reliable ranking to the states of India in the renewable energy generation arena. The methodology adopted in the article rests on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). One of the recently developed super-efficiency DEA formulations is integrated with a procedure to allow for non-discretionary input variables. The integration may fail to be feasible in certain cases. To deal with infeasibility, a heuristics is proposed. Using a simulation, it is demonstrated that the approach yields complete and fairly reliable rankings in the vast majority of the cases. Tamil Nadu appears as the leader followed by Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Andhra Pradesh are the laggards. Rankings will be useful for policy-makers in identifying the leaders and the laggards in the renewable energy sector, and hence, for fine tuning the policies to promote better renewable energy deployment. Rankings will also be helpful for investors in the sector by providing them with a simple tool to identify lucrative investment options. The approach is fairly generalizable to many other practical cases. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.