Evaluation of power plants in Turkey using Analytic Network Process (ANP)

Abstract

Energy is one of the most important parameters of the development of societies. Low cost, clean and secure energy supply is a common issue for all countries. Every country spends commercial and political effort to avoid not having sufficient energy and to ensure an uninterrupted energy supply. This study attempts to determine the suitability of existing power plants in Turkey and the plants that are being considered for establishment in the near future. The alternatives which are being considered are natural gas, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, and coal/lignite energy plants as well as nuclear energy plants. By using the multi-criteria decision making technique of Analytic Network Process (ANP), a multi-criteria evaluations of six different energy plants were performed with respect to the major criteria such as technology and sustainability, economical suitability, life quality and socio-economic impacts.

Introduction

The need for energy and the increasing electricity demand are directly proportional to population growth, industrialization and urbanization. According to this, the energy needs of developing countries have been increasing in recent years. The increase in the rate of industrialization in developing countries caused more energy consumption. The lack of adequate technical equipment in energy consumption and the underdeveloped service industry are insufficient to satisfy the demand. In order to produce energy in the desired quantity, countries which are under conditions of international competition require different types of decision making mechanisms to respond to emerging demands.

When they consider the distribution of power plants in Turkey and their technological, economic, socio-economic, and life quality impacts for the decision of which type of power plant to build in order to respond to our country's energy needs, decision makers must choose the best alternatives to realize their objectives. The effectiveness of these decisions can be measured with the degree of demand satisfaction. Also by making the selection by using scientific decision making techniques, they will determine which investment is most suitable from the perspective of investors and countries, and it will allow making faster, more reliable and more effective decisions regarding the installation of power plants.

Using only numerical data in the solution of decision making problems can cause inadequate decision making problems. This situation also leads the criteria to conflict with each other, thus it directly affects decision making. Therefore with the inclusion of both quantitative and qualitative data, the necessity of multi-criteria decision making methods emerged. In this way, it is possible to make decisions based on more useful data and criteria. In this study, the multi-criteria decision making process of Analytic Network Process (ANP) is used for evaluating existing and to-be-installed power plants in Turkey.

ANP is a multi-criteria decision making process developed by Saaty. ANP is a problem solving structure that organizes the decision maker's perceptions, emotions, judgments and information in the memory, i.e. the factors affecting the result of the decision, in the form of hierarchies. For the given decisions' being more realistic, decision models should also include and measure important factors that are concrete, abstract, quantitative and qualitative. The validity of the decision depends on the method which is used in the solution, as well as the model structure and the richness and accuracy of the relationships in the structure [1]. ANP is a network structure which can accommodate complex relationships. Like the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), ANP was developed by Thomas Saaty. ANP also takes the dependence between alternatives (networks) into account. The interaction between alternatives is analyzed [2].

AHP is a simple and easy to implement method which is being used in many decision making problems today. AHP problems are modeled such that there is the objective at the top, criteria under that and alternatives at the bottom. The ANP method, on the other hand, is the more general form of AHP which allows feedback and dependence between and among the decision making criteria and the alternatives, and thus enables more accurate modeling of complex decision environments.

The structural difference between AHP (hierarchy) and ANP (Networks) is also shown in Fig. 1.

As it can be seen in the Fig. 1, the hierarchy is the simple and special case of the network. A system with feedback can be represented by a network where nodes correspond to the levels or components. The elements in a node (or level) may influence some or all the elements of any other node. In a network, there can be source nodes, intermediate nodes and sink nodes. Relationships in a network are represented by arcs, and the directions of arcs signify dependence.

This study uses the multi-criteria decision making technique of ANP to investigate which of the six most widely used power plants should be installed in Turkey.

First, a review of the literature on multi-criteria decision making techniques about power plants was performed.