A New Integrated Approach for Determination of Turkey’s Solar Energy Production Strategies: The Fuzzy Expanded SWOT

Abstract

Because of Turkey's high solar energy potential due to its geographical location and certain advantages of the solar energy, the solar energy is one of the most important among renewable energy types which are invested in the country. Therefore, it aimed to determine of the strategies related to Turkey's solar energy production in this study. For this, a new integrated method called the Fuzzy Expanded SWOT, consisting of the Fuzzy AHP and the Expanded SWOT methods, has been proposed. The proposed method eliminates many disadvantages of the traditional SWOT analysis. First of all, factors and sub-factors related to the solar energy were determined by the Expanded SWOT analysis. Subsequently, the local weights of the factors and sub-factors were determined by the Fuzzy AHP method. The sub-factors which are insignificant according to the weights found, were eliminated and the global weights of the remaining sub-factors were found. Finally, sub-factors were prioritized according to their global weights and strategies were determined based on the Expanded SWOT matrix, taking these priorities into consideration. As a result of the analyzes, it was observed that the strategies which should be dwelled on related to solar energy production in the Turkey, are ones which concentrate on R&D studies in public institutions, private sector and universities.