Selection of Small Hydropower Project Site: a Multi- Criteria Optimization Technique Approach

Small hydropower projects (SHP) are emerging as solution for sustainable, eco-friendly, long term and costeffective water or renewable energy resource for future. Selecting the appropriate small hydropower project site and its parameters in which to invest is a critical task involving different factors as each project is unique and site specific. Hence such decision-making can be viewed as a multi-criteria optimization problem with correlating criteria and alternatives. This task should take into consideration several conflicting aspects because of the increasing complexity of the socio-political, technological, environmental and economic factors. Traditional single criteria decision-making approaches cannot handle the complexity of such systems. Multi-criteria optimization or MCDA or MCDM methods may provide a better and flexible tool. This paper aims to evaluate applicability of multi-criteria optimization to decision makers during the small hydropower project site selection. To the best of the author’s knowledge these novel approaches for application of multicriteria optimization in small hydropower site selection are absent in renewable energy or water resource or fluid mechanics literature due to its assessment complexity.