Development of Assessment Model for Selection of Sustainable Energy Source in India: Hybrid Fuzzy MCDM Approach

Abstract

The development of India is continuously affected due to some severe issues of the energy crisis and greenhouse gas emission. To overcome or minimize these problems, India should increase the share of sustainable energy sources in an overall generation. Therefore, this work aims to develop a model for the selection of the most sustainable energy sources in India. The model is developed using integrated multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach to deal with the number of conflicting and uncertain criteria. The developed model has a unique combination of seven energy alternatives, six criteria, and their related twenty-six sub-criteria. The weights were collected using linguistic terminology to avoid any kind of incomplete or vague information. Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (F-AHP) was employed to make a pairwise comparison and to obtain the weights of the considered criteria and sub-criteria. Fuzzy Weighted Aggregated Sum Product Assessment (F-WASPAS) used for the ranking of the energy alternatives. Result shows that economic criterion has the highest weight, followed by the environmental and technical criterion. Solar energy obtained as the most sustainable alternative energy source in India. Wind energy was chosen as the second-most sustainable alternative energy source, followed by the hydro and biomass energy. Sensitivity analysis was performed by changing the values of λ coefficient. Results were compared and validated with three other well-known MCDM approaches of VIKOR, TOPSIS, and PROMETHEE - II.