Optimal site selection of rural wind–photovoltaic-storage station from a sustainable development perspective

Abstract

Due to the large amount of greenhouse gas emissions, sustainable power projects like rural wind–photovoltaic-storage stations (WPSS) have been recently proposed. There are a lot of uncertainties decrease investors’ willingness to invest in those projects. To select better location of power station construction and ensure its overall economic optimization base on sustainability perspective is an important issue for investors. This study established practical evaluation criteria for the site selection of WPSS under the fuzzy environment, which consist of 15 criteria from the dimension of resource and technical, environmental, social and policy, and economic. A hybrid method combining Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL), Analytic Network Process (ANP) and Interactive Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (TODIM) was proposed to determine the weights of evaluation criteria and screen out the optimal site. The results show that the most important risk factors are economic factors (0.388), among which, utilization level of investment cost is the most important one (0.234). Besides, the priorities of alternative location may change due to different risk preference. In this paper, the ranking is P3>P4>P2>P1. This study helps WPSS investors find out the optimal site in a few candidates. For WPSS projects, decision-makers should focus more on economic risks, especially utilization level of investment cost. While social and policy factors (service radius and public acceptance) remain the secondary and should be carefully dealt with during the site-selection stage.

Keywords

• Rural wind–photovoltaic-storage station
• Trapezoid interval type-2 fuzzy set
• DEMATEL
• ANP
• TODIM
• Sustainability perspective