Assessment of Green Energy Alternatives Using Fuzzy ANP

Sustainability has gained tremendous importance and has been an important issue both for policy makers and practitioners. Realizing that the resources on the earth are limited, green energy (GE) alternatives have flourished and started to replace the conventional energy alternatives. Energy planning using different energy alternatives, for the long term becomes a vital decision. In this study, fuzzy multi criteria decision- making methodology, fuzzy analytic network process (FANP) are utilized for the ranking GE alternatives. The ANP is a multi criteria decision-making (MCDM) technique which enables feedback and replaces hierarchies of relationships with networks of relationships. In ANP technique, not only does the importance of the criteria determine the importance of the alternatives, as in a hierarchy, but also the importance of the alternatives may have impact on the importance of the criteria. Fuzzy ANP allows measuring qualitative factors by using fuzzy numbers instead of crisp numbers in order to make decisions easier and obtain more realistic results. A case study is presented for the assessment of GE alternatives in Turkey with respect to various perspectives such as; technical, economical, and environmental. According to the outcome of the BO/CR method, hydropower has the highest priority which is followed by geothermal and biomass energy sources. Though the hydropower is not the best alternative from Benefits and Opportunities viewpoint, because of low costs and risks it comes into view to be the best alternative for Turkey.