Renewable Energy Problems: Exploring the Methods to Support the Decision-Making Process

Abstract

In the current scenario of increasing energy demand and encouraging sustainable development in countries, the energy sector’s planning has become more complex, involving multiple factors, such as technical, economic, environmental, social, and political. The decision process plays a vital role in structuring and evaluating complex decision situations related to the sector, considering various criteria and objectives, encouraging adopting policies to promote energy efficiency actions by increasing research on renewable energy sources and strategic energy decisions. The high number of multi-criteria decision support methods (MCDM) available and their efficiency in solving highly complex problems results in an impasse with their selection and application in specific decision situations. Thus, the scientific community requires methodological approaches that help the decision-maker select the method consistent with his problem. Accordingly, this paper conducts a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of renewable energy problems associated with MCDM methods based on a final set of 163 articles. We identified five categories of problems solved by MCDM techniques: Source selection, location, sustainability, project performance, and technological performance. We separate the MCDM process into five evaluation steps (alternative selection, criteria selection, criteria weighting, evaluation of alternatives, and post-assessment analyzes), and we extract the methods used in each MCDM step from papers. This paper’s main contribution is identifying the most common MCDM methods in the renewable energy area and the energy problem they solve. Accordingly, this manuscript helps energy decision-makers, entrepreneurs, investors, and policy-makers to improve their ability to choose the proper MCDM methods to solve energy problems.

Adopting Multiactor Multicriteria Analysis for the Evaluation of Energy Scenarios

“…The use of multicriteria analysis (MCA) methods has become increasingly popular to achieve consensus and balance interests despite conflicting goals [36][37][38][39][40]. Especially for the assessment of renewable technologies, MCA methods have been applied extensively in recent years, as the reviews by Rigo et al [41] and Siksnelyte-Butkiene [42] highlight. The application of MCA allows for integrating the values of stakeholders across the different phases of the planning process by collecting, structuring and analysing the related information [43].…”

The cooperation between suppliers and an agro-industrial slaughterhouse: a measurement tool

“…The modeling construction (Section 4) aims to develop a performance system to measure the cooperation level between an agro-industrial pork slaughterhouse cooperative and input suppliers using lean supply chain management factors. The approach is based on the use of two elements: critical success factors (CSFs) and KPIs, organized in a hierarchical structure based on the AHP method (Shah & Ward, 2007;Neuenfeldt Júnior et al, 2014;Nora et al, 2016;Rigo et al, 2020). The KPIs are used to detail the CSF, measuring in practice the supplier's performance regarding specific cooperation characteristics.…”

“…The main performance measurement objective is to assess the status of system and processes into an organization, based on monitoring indicators organized in a systematic structure (Ivanov & Avasilcăi, 2014;Rigo et al, 2020). A fundamental performance measurement assumption is that any tangible or intangible variables are measurable in practice (Barboza et al, 2013).…”

Multiple Criteria Decision Making for the Achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Goals: A Systematic Literature Review and a Research Agenda

“…Covering the time frame 2010 to 2020 and focusing more specifically on previous studies that employed the systematic literature review (SLR) approach to give a comprehensive overview of what has been done in the MCDM research field, a literature search was conducted accessing documents from the Scopus database. This search yielded 70 reviews, but only a few are concerned with MCDM applications for sustainable development issues [22][23][24][25][26][27][28]. Kumar et al (2017) [22] have reviewed MCDM techniques for renewable energy development.…”

“…Based on a review of 163 articles, Rigo et al [24] identified the most common MCDM methods adopted in the renewable energy area and the decision problems they helped to solve. The authors identified five decision problems in this area: source selection, location, sustainability, project performance, and technological performance.…”