New multi-criteria method for evaluation of sustainable RES management

Abstract

This paper introduces a new V-COMET method for assessing the sustainable management of renewable energy sources (RES) in European countries. The proposed method belongs to the multi-criteria methods and is free of significant shortcomings occurring in most Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methods. The paper shows that the V-COMET method is characterized by high accuracy and has very limited computational complexity. The practical contribution of the paper covers the use of the developed V-COMET method in RES assessment. The practical research domain covers the evaluation of 30 European countries in respect of criteria provided by Eurostat (the statistical office of the European Union). Three evaluation models with high criteria details for comparison were proposed: model with KTOE, percentage, and TOE per capita data. Due to the practical potential of the model with data in TOE per capita based on the V-COMET method, full robustness and sensitivity tests of the country rankings were carried out, showing the wide practical possibilities of the proposed approach. Additionally, a methodological evaluation of the proposed V-COMET method was performed. For this purpose, the uncertainty was investigated, and the developed V-COMET method was benchmarked with the set reference MCDA methods. The results allow concluding that the proposed method shows very high accuracy.