Sustainability-Oriented Decision-Making on Solar Photovoltaic Location Selection

Determining a desirable location for a solar photovoltaic (PV) power plant is always an essential issue to be discussed among stakeholders. In this chapter, an integrated method combining the techniques of IF-DEMATEL (intuitionistic fuzzy decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory) and TODIM (an acronym in Portuguese for interactive and multicriteria decision-making) is proposed to analyze whether a site is sustainable for solar PV power plants. First, a generic criteria system based on sustainability in determining the location site of solar PV power plants is presented. The sustainability criteria system consists of four categories: geographical conditions, social factors, economic factors, and environmental factors. Then, the hesitant fuzzy set (HFS) and intuitionistic fuzzy set (IFS) are used to accurately describe the preference of experts. IF-DEMATEL is synergistically applied to calculate the weight of each criterion and TODIM is adopted for ranking the different candidates. Finally, a case study is conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method