Abstract
In pursuit of green technology innovations, the energy industry is showing an interest in sustainable sources such as wind energy generation. The Saudi Arabian energy industry has a 2030 target to generate and transmit electricity to major customers nationwide and other neighboring Gulf countries. However, the selection of wind energy power plant locations is a concern because the decision process involves social, technological, economical, and environmental factors. The originality of this study lies in (1) proposing an integrated quantitative and qualitative multi-criteria decision making framework for selecting wind-energy power plant locations; (2) applying the proposed framework in the context of the energy industry in a gulf region country and investigating expert-based and entropy-based criterion weight assignments; (3) choosing five possible alternative wind energy power plant locations with 17 response criteria for each alternative to help decision makers identify the best possible alternative; and (4) establishing the superiority of one alternative over another (if it exists). The presented approach extends considerable support to the comparing and ranking of alternatives along with its validation and sensitivity analysis. Based on the proposed multi-criteria decision-making approach, an appropriate wind energy power plant location has been successfully selected among the five alternatives.
Highlights
Non-renewable sources of energy are being continuously depleted
The objective of this study is to propose an integrated quantitative and qualitative multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) framework for selecting wind-energy power plant locations, and the proposed framework takes into consideration the strategies of the energy sector in the gulf region
From the results of the sensitivity analysis, it is evident that wind energy power plant locations WPPL4 and WPPL5 are the worst choices compared with the other alternatives, while WPPL3 is the best overall choice
Summary
Non-renewable sources of energy are being continuously depleted. the use of fossil fuels is perilous to the environment, and their precarious nature is gradually becoming prominent [1]. The objective of this study is to propose an integrated quantitative and qualitative MCDM framework for selecting wind-energy power plant locations, and the proposed framework takes into consideration the strategies of the energy sector in the gulf region. Five possible wind-energy power plant locations were chosen with 17 response criteria for each alternative to assist decision makers in identifying the best possible alternative. This paper is organized in five sections: Section 1 is an introduction; Section 2 presents the problem and visual preference ranking organization method for enrichment of evaluations (PROMETHEE) approach for selecting wind power plant locations; Section 3 compares and rank orders the alternatives; subsequently, Section 4 presents a sensitivity analysis with subjective and objective criteria weights; and Section 5 concludes the research findings
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