A Prologue On Energy Planning Methodology

Energy decisions have intensive impacts on national economies. Any energy decision needs information about energy demand and energy supply trends and their projections. It also needs information about technological changes in supply, transformation and consumption sectors. All of that information is needed in comprehensive energy planning. Energy Planning can be defined as a process of developing long-range policies to improve energy decisions through demand and supply balancing respect to environment and help guide the future of a local, national, regional or even the global energy system. Rapid progress made in the field of electronic data processing has led to a boom of computerized tools in the field of energy planning as much as in any other areas of systematic analysis. To this main emphasis is on the balancing production, transformation and distribution of energy commodities respect to environmental considerations. As statistics indicate, Iran has a considerable share of world's energy resources but in one hand energy consumption in Iran is more than world's standards and the other hand, low energy efficiency shows necessity of energy planning in national and local level. So this paper takes the description of energy planning issues and their methodologies. To this energy planning models and tools and their development are introduced briefly.