A fuzzy AHP-PROMETHEE II approach for evaluation of solar power plant location alternatives in Turkey

Solar energy, produced through a solar power plant, is a freely available, non-polluting, renewable source of energy that reduces the greenhouse effect. Selecting the best location for a solar power plant among several location alternatives is a complicated multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) problem since several potentially conflicting quantitative and qualitative criteria needs to be taken into consideration. In this paper, of the most commonly used MCDM methods in literature; the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and PROMETHEE II (Preference Ranking Organization Method for Enriching Evaluations) are integrated with fuzzy logic, called F-AHP and F-PROMETHEE II to evaluate solar power plant location alternatives. As the F-AHP is utilized to determine the importance weights of criteria, the F-PROMETHEE II is used to rank solar energy power plant location alternatives with respect to these criteria. Moreover, to demostrate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed approach for potential readers, a real-life case study in Turkey is presented.