Sustainability ranking of energy storage technologies under uncertainties

The selection of the most suitable or the best energy storage technology among multiple alternatives is of vital importance for promoting the development of renewable energy. This study aims at developing a multi-attribute decision analysis framework for sustainability prioritization of energy storage technologies. A criteria system which consists of ten criteria in four categories (economic, performance, technological and environmental) was developed for sustainability assessment of energy storage technologies. The Non-Linear Fuzzy Prioritization which allows the users to use fuzzy numbers to establish the comparison judgments was employed to determine the weights of the evaluation criteria, and a novel interval multi-attribute decision analysis method which can rank the alternative energy storage technologies based on the interval decision-making matrix was developed for sustainability prioritization of energy storage technologies. An illustrative case including five energy storage technologies including pumped hydro (PH), compressed air (CA), Lead-Acid (LA), Lithium-ion (LI), and Flywheel (FW) was studied by the proposed method, and PH was recognized as the most sustainable technology. The results were validated by the interval TOPSIS method, and sensitivity analysis was also carried out to investigate the effects of the weights of the evaluation criteria on the sustainability order of the five energy storage technologies. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.