A Hybrid Multiple-Criteria Decision-Making Approach for Photovoltaic Solar Plant Location Selection

Due to decaying fossil resource and increasing environmental consciousness, the demand of renewable energy resources is escalating these days. Photovoltaic solar energy is one of the most popular renewable energy resources in places where sunlight is abundant. The selection of a desirable location for constructing a photovoltaic solar plant is the first and one of the most important stages in the plant construction to provide a long-term energy production. In this paper, a comprehensive multiple-criteria decision-making model, which incorporates the interpretive structural modeling (ISM), fuzzy analytic network process (FANP) and VIKOR (VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje in Serbian, meaning multi-criteria optimization and compromise solution), is proposed to select the most suitable photovoltaic solar plant location. The ISM is applied first to determine the interrelationships among the criteria and among the sub-criteria, and the results are used to construct a decision-making network. The FANP is applied next to solve the network and to calculate the importance weights of the sub-criteria. Finally, the VIKOR is adopted to determine the ranking of the photovoltaic solar plant locations. The proposed model is applied in a case study in evaluating photovoltaic solar plant locations in Taiwan. By applying the proposed model, decision makers can have a better thinking process and make more appropriate decisions justifiably.