Renewable energy portfolio optimization with public participation under uncertainty: A hybrid multi-attribute multi-objective decision-making method

Abstract

With the demand for energy increasing rapidly, the public is increasingly concerned about renewable energy (RE) planning. However, existing studies on RE planning rarely involved public opinions in the decision-making process. This study devotes to introducing a multi-attribute multi-objective decision-making model for RE portfolio selection with public participation. First, to reduce the complexity of the problem resulted from many participators, a linguistic risk appetite-based method is adopted to classify the public into subgroups. Considering that public opinions may be incomplete, the evidential reasoning approach is then used to aggregate the opinions of individuals within a subgroup. Next, the stochastic multi-attribute acceptability analysis method is applied to aggregate the preferences among subgroups and further derive a robust result regarding the public’s social acceptance of RE technologies. On the basis of the derived social acceptance, a risk-based fuzzy interval goal programming model is proposed to derive the optimal RE portfolio. Finally, an illustrative case of optimizing RE portfolios is given to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed model.