Sustainability performance evaluation of energy generation projects

Abstract

Affordable and reliable energy is not only central to prosperity, but also to poverty reduction, local development, environmental integrity, quality of life, growth, and progress. Given the importance and wide scale of energy generation all around the world, its ever growing economic, social and environmental aspects need to be taken into better consideration. The sustainability performance of energy operations shall be assessed on a project basis, as energy generation projects may significantly vary, depending on the needs and circumstances. This chapter introduces a novel approach for evaluating energy projects from a sustainability point of view and estimates their sustainability performance as a decision-making support tool. Decision environments can sometimes be complicated for an individual decision maker (DM) to consider every aspect of the problem. Group decision making (GDM) can be advantageous to reduce the impact of biased and personal opinions on the decision process. Moreover, DMs’ judgments are mostly far from being completely certain, making it more difficult to put their ratings into numerical forms. In such circumstances, the fuzzy set theory can be applied to better represent DMs’ preferences. This chapter applies GDM together with the fuzzy set theory to find the importance of the selected evaluation criteria. Then, GDM and the fuzzy set theory are combined with VIKOR (Vlse Kriterijumska Optimizacija Kompromisno Resenje) technique to rank the energy project alternatives. This approach is particularly useful for its strength in dealing with actual energy projects so that it can support both researchers and business managers to compare the sustainability performance of planned or realized power plants in a balanced manner. The usability of the proposed approach is shown in a case study from Turkey, where different energy projects are evaluated for their overall sustainability performance.