A New Sustaınable Index Model Assessment for Solar Energy Systems

Abstract

The energy produced from the solar panel is, in principle, related to the incoming solar irradiation. However, there may be several parameters affecting the efficiency of the solar energy systems such as the climatic factors (i.e. the relative humidity, cloudiness, etc), the environmental and land use (i.e. air quality, topographic properties, etc), and the socio-economic indicators (i.e. energy demand, human development index, the transmission lines, etc). In this study, a new methodology was established to interpret the effect of such factors on the sustainability of the solar energy system comprehensively. To this end, the methods of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), namely PROMETHEE and VIKOR, were employed to evaluate the solar energy potential for each province of Turkey. First, a total of 28 different indicators were gathered from several reliable and publicly available data sources. These indicators were categorized into 3 main dimensions such Environmental and Land-Use related parameters (ELU), Technological and Meteorological-Related parameters (TME), and Energy Demand-Related parameters (EDM). MCDA methods were then applied to sort the responses of provinces with the indicators in each dimension. Also, all parameters as a whole were studied with MCDA methods. A number of scenarios were created to understand the effects of the classification of the indicators in the dimensions on the overall ranking process. A new sustainability index (SI) was proposed for quick assessments of these indicators. The results from the analyses indicate that any ranking arranged with only using solar radiation values may be insufficient for a holistic evaluation. In addition, the proposed SI was regarded as a good indicator to combine the outranking results when the importance of the selected criteria on the overall results is unknown. To conclude, the proposed approach has a promising feature to be extended to assess the sustainability of other clean energy systems such as hydropower and wind energy for further studies.