Abstract & Overview
To increase efficiency of energy sector, the implementation of renewable energy systems and finding most appropriate renewable energy resource is of high significance for governments. One of the fundamental decision-making problems in energy sector is to design decision making tools to find optimal energy resources. Usually, experts in the energy decision-making sector have a platform containing multiple criteria indicators that are expressed as conflicting objectives. In this paper, we proposed a Multiple Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) model to handle conflicting objectives while evaluating five renewable resources: solar PV, Solar thermal, wind power, geothermal, and biomass with respect to economic, technical, social, and environmental aspects. Shannon Entropy method is used to determine the importance of criteria. Evaluation based on distance from average solution (EDAS) is used to prioritize the renewable energy technologies. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed decision-making model, a real-life case study for Saudi Arabia is investigated. Under defined socio-economic and environment criteria, results indicate that wind energy can be opted the as most suitable source fitted to the objectives and policies of the decision makers. In order to verify the results and to show the impact of parameter changes on final solutions, different sensitivity analysis tests are performed.