Abstract
Sustainable development demands no depletion of energy resources that have lower environmental impact, that are available at reasonable costs and that do not have negative social impacts. Because of the multi-dimensionality of this sustainable goal multi – criteria methods have become popular in sustainable decision-making processes. In this paper, we have developed a model for decision makers to rank small hydropower projects according to multiple criteria. The proposed model ranks projects based on technical, economic, social, and environmental criteria. The model is supported by two multi-criteria decision analysis methods: PROMETHEE (to rank projects) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (to determine the weights of main criteria). It is observed that the most important criteria are found to be the investment safety, legal obstacles and the amount of flow and the flow pattern. The proposed model is successfully tested on the example of 24 small hydropower plants. Highest ranked projects are those were criterion “annual production” was the highest and with the lowest scores in environmental aspect criteria. The presented model can give objective standpoint to decision makers, energy policies designers and energy planners.
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