Comprehensive Benefit Evaluation of Power Grid Investment Considering Renewable Energy Development from the Perspective of Sustainability

Abstract

To cope with the rapid development of renewable energy, the power grid system needs to invest in and construct transmission and distribution projects. Means of evaluating the economic, social, and environmental benefits generated by power grid investment are of great significance for enterprise cost recovery and government policy formulation. In this paper, an evaluation of the comprehensive benefit of a power grid investment considering renewable energy development from the perspective of sustainability is developed through the use of a hybrid multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) method. The entropy weight method and fuzzy best worst method (BWM) are jointly employed to weight the comprehensive benefit criteria, which include economic, social, and environmental criteria and eight sub-criteria, and the measurement of alternatives and ranking according to compromise solution (MARCOS) method is utilized to evaluate the comprehensive benefit of a power grid investment. Five power grid investment projects for connecting renewable energy generation to a power grid in Ningxia, China, are selected as a case study, and the results indicate that the power grid investment project PGIP#1 has the largest comprehensive benefit (0.7099), followed by PGIP#3 (0.6800), PGIP#2 (0.6709), PGIP#5 (0.5959), and PGIP#4 (0.5861). The sensitivity analysis shows that the comprehensive benefit of PGIP#1 is always the best, indicating the robustness of the proposed method. By employing the proposed MCDM method to assess the comprehensive benefit of power grid investment projects, this research identifies outstanding projects which can provide guidance for the management of power grid investment and promote the sustainable development of the power industry.