Biogas-based sustainable rural electrification in India: A techno-economic framework integrating spatial heterogeneity of agro-residues

Sustainable rural electrification remains elusive for remote marginalised communities in developing countries such as India, where agricultural residues are abundantly available but largely underutilised or openly burned, leading to environmental and health impacts. This study advances energy-environment resilience by integrating agro-waste utilisation into decentralised energy planning. A feedstock-sensitive bioelectricity framework based on state- and union territory-wise biomass resource availability and utilisation has been developed. A comprehensive crop-wise and location-specific evaluation quantifies unutilised agro-residue potential and corresponding biogas-based electricity generation, indicating that biogas can contribute an aggregate of 22.58% of irrigation demand, 48.97% of rural household demand, and 6.91% of energy deficits, while significantly reducing carbon footprint. The estimated potential defines the upper-bound resource envelope for decentralised cluster-level biogas deployment. HOMER-based optimisation of an operational solar PV–biogas–battery microgrid demonstrates the techno-economic viability of biogas as a dispatchable alternative to diesel while highlighting the impact of biomass variability on system performance. The knowledge base developed in this work enables a decision-support tool for location-specific supply-chain planning by policymakers and decentralised, feedstock-specific biogas system planning by potential investors and microgrid operators, while being focused on India and scalable to other developing agrarian nations for decentralised clean energy using local agro-residues.