Decision making in renewable energy investments: A review

One of the problems facing researchers in the application of renewable energy systems is that the evaluation of the sustainability is extremely perplex. Decision making in energy projects requires consideration of technical, economic, environmental and social impacts and is often complicated. This paper presents a review of the current state of the art in decision support methods applied to renewable and sustainable energy throughout the literature in the field of energy planning. The selected papers were classified by their year of publication, decision making technique, energy type, the criteria used, geographic distribution and the application areas. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.