Analyzing barriers of Smart Energy City in Accra with two-step fuzzy DEMATEL

The prevalence of Smart Energy City (SEC) has over the years been seen as a preemptive measure in dealing with many energy problems faced by cities. Like other cities, Accra faces several barriers on its way to achieve SEC. This research seeks to identify possible barriers hindering Accra as a city from becoming a SEC and prioritizing these barriers based on both importance with consideration of interactions between barriers using a two-step Decision Making, Trial and Evaluation Laboratory under fuzzy set environment i.e. two-step fuzzy DEMATEL. For Accra, the results indicate that market barriers are the most important barriers while limited access to capital has the highest global importance score in the whole SEC barriers system. Besides, technology barriers, policy barriers and market barriers are found as cause barriers and high cost of technology dispatches more impact on other barriers in technology barriers category. High interest rate and unstable currency, inadequate infrastructure requiring huge investments, insufficient legal and regulatory framework, high cost of technology and lack of information about cost and benefits of renewable energy technology are deserved to be paid more attention since they have both high important and cause indexes. The result is to enhance strategic decision making since this combination of methods deals with the possible human sentiments in decision making and also organizes barriers into cause and effect groups based on their interactions, with the cause groups been critical since their presence can give rise to effect group barriers.