A Hybrid Hesitant Fuzzy Decision-Making Approach for Evaluating Solar Power Plant Location Sites

Investments in energy projects require careful consideration, since inappropriate decisions can lead investors to waste finances, time and other resources. This paper will present the position that decisions for energy projects should be made after considerable, thoughtful and appropriate decision research and analyses. Due to the different aspects related to investment decisions in energy projects, using multi-criteria decision-making approaches is deemed to be a sensible approach to better ensure an appropriate course of action. In this study, the decision regarding location of a solar power plant, a critical issue pertaining to solar energy investments, is considered. Since solar power plant location decisions consist of conflicting criteria and varying possible locations, the solar power plant location problem is considered in this study. The main aim of this study is to propose a decision-making approach for solar power plant location problem which is integrating “Analytic Hierarchy Process” and “Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution” methods under hesitant fuzzy environment. The applicability of the proposed approach is then tested on a case study. Besides the innovative contributions to industry literature, the results of the case study demonstrate that the proposed approach is applicable for the challenge of determining plant locations.