Abstract
Due to decaying fossil resource and increasing environmental consciousness, the demand of renewable energy resources is escalating these days. Photovoltaic solar energy is one of the most popular renewable energy resources in places where sunlight is abundant. The selection of a desirable location for constructing a photovoltaic solar plant is the first and one of the most important stages in the plant construction to provide a long-term energy production. In this paper, a comprehensive multiple-criteria decision-making model, which incorporates the interpretive structural modeling (ISM), fuzzy analytic network process (FANP) and VIKOR (VlseKriterijumska OptimizacijaI Kompromisno Resenje in Serbian,meaning multi-criteria optimization and compromise solution), is proposed to select the most suitable photovoltaic solar plant location. The ISM is applied first to determine the interrelationships among the criteria and among the sub-criteria,andtheresults are used to construct a decision-making network. The FANP is applied next to solve the network and to calculate the importance weights of the sub-criteria. Finally, the VIKOR is adopted to determine the ranking of the photovoltaic solar plant locations. The proposed model is applied in a case study in evaluating photovoltaic solar plant locations in Taiwan. By applying the proposed model, decision makers can have a better thinking process and make more appropriate decisions justifiably.
Highlights
Climate changes and environmental pollution have caught the attention of many developing and developed counties to replace fossil fuel energy with renewable energy
Yeh and Huang [1] proposed a model to understand the importance of various factors in evaluating wind farm locations by integrating goal/question/metric (GQM) method, fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL), and analytic network process (ANP)
Singh et al [36] constructed an integrated analytic hierarchy process (AHP)-VIKOR method under interval-valued fuzzy environment for sustainable manufacturing strategy selection, and linguistic variables were adopted to evaluate the performance of strategies and the weights of criteria
Summary
Climate changes and environmental pollution have caught the attention of many developing and developed counties to replace fossil fuel energy with renewable energy. Aragonés-Beltrán et al [7] proposed two multiple-criteria decision-making models to evaluate photovoltaic solar power plant investment projects by considering six categories of risks and fifty project execution delay and/or stoppage risks. The weights of the criteria were calculated by the AHP, and the ranking of the power plants was obtained by applying the TOPSIS. Aragonés-Beltrán et al [9] proposed a three-phase multi-criteria decision approach for selecting solar-thermal power plant investment projects. A decision-making model is necessary for selecting the most suitable photovoltaic solar plant location. Based on the weights of the sub-criteria, the VIKOR is applied to calculate the overall performances of the photovoltaic solar plant locations.
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