Sustainability prioritization of energy storage technologies for promoting the development of renewable energy: A novel intuitionistic fuzzy combinative distance-based assessment approach

Energy storage technology plays an important role for promoting the development of renewable energy sources due to their highly erratic and intermittent characteristics. However, it is usually difficult for the decision-makers/stakeholders to select the most sustainable scenario among multiple energy storage technologies. This study aims at developing a novel multi-criteria decision making method by combining the interval analytic hierarchy process (IAHP) and the intuitionistic fuzzy combinative distance-based assessment method for prioritizing the alternative energy storage technologies. Four alternative energy storage technologies including pumped hydro, compressed air, lithium-ion, and flywheel were studied by the proposed method, the sustainability sequence of the four energy storage technologies from the most sustainable to the least is pumped hydro, flywheel, lithium-ion, and compressed air. Sensitivity analysis was also carried out to investigate the effects of the weights of the metrics on the sustainability ranking of the four alternative energy storage technologies, and the results reveal that altering the preferences/willingness of the decision-makers/stakeholders and the relative importance of the metrics will change the sustainability ranking of the four energy storage technologies.