Sustainability of agricultural waste power generation industry in China: criteria relationship identification and policy design mechanism

The sustainable development of the agricultural waste power generation industry (AWPGI) can reduce environmental pollutants' emissions and ameliorate energy shortage. However, the current development of AWPGI lacks sustainability. Hence, to address this issue, a Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) model considering relative index weight is utilized, and the fuzzy composite DEMATEL model is employed to identify the interrelationship of the internal system criteria. According to the obtained results, the system's cause factors include reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, investment costs, and management costs, and improving technology maturity, energy conversion efficiency, technical complexity, safety and reliability. The effect factors include the non-renewable energy utilization, reduction of agricultural waste and production costs, competitiveness, social acceptability, regional development contribution, government support degree, water use, sound pollution, and job production. The internal relationships between the mentioned two factors are further verified, indicating that diverse cause factors can affect different effect factors. Moreover, systematic policies are designed to improve the power generation industry's sustainability based on the obtained results. The findings can help power generation companies and government decision-makers to make effective decisions to promote the sustainability of the AWPGI.