Elsevier

Renewable Energy

Volume 34, Issue 1, January 2009, Pages 120-126
Renewable Energy

Multi-criteria decision making on strategic selection of wind farms

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2008.04.013Get rights and content

Abstract

With maturity of advanced technologies and urgent requirement for maintaining a healthy environment with reasonable price, China is moving toward a trend of generating electricity from renewable wind resources. How to select a suitable wind farm becomes an important focus for stakeholders. This paper first briefly introduces wind farm and then develops its critical success criteria. A new multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) model, based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) associated with benefits, opportunities, costs and risks (BOCR), is proposed to help select a suitable wind farm project. Multiple factors that affect the success of wind farm operations are analyzed by taking into account experts' opinions, and a performance ranking of the wind farms is generated.

Introduction

The rapid development in wind energy technology has made it the most promising alternative to conventional energy systems in recent years [1]. In China, with potential capacity of 250 GW, the installed capacity of wind power increased steadily from 54, 25, 84, 90, 67, 93, 134, 756 to 1200 MW for year 1998 through year 2006 [2]. In order to encourage the installation of renewable and sustainable energy in China, Renewable Energy Law (REL), January 2006, stipulated that renewable energy must contribute 10% of national energy supply by year 2020. Electricity grid dispatchers are obligated to purchase electricity generated from renewable and sustainable sources. The REL is administrated by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), but is implemented by governments at regional and local levels. Decisions on regional targets will be based upon regional circumstances including the availability of renewable energy [3].

It is foreseeable that the move to generating electricity through wind farms in China will become the main trend in future years. However, because of increasing complexity in the socio-economic surroundings and rapidly changing technologies, the selection of a suitable wind farm is an important issue for private associations, political groups, and private sectors. In the authors' understanding, no work, except Moran and Sherrington [4] and Strbac et al. [5], which assesses the economic feasibility of a large-scale wind farm project by benefit and cost analysis, has ever described and analyzed such an important issue based on benefits, opportunities, costs and risks simultaneously. In order to fill the vacancy, the paper will briefly introduce a wind farm and its critical success criteria, and then develop a selection model to help evaluate wind farm projects. In conventional AHP, a well-known multiple criteria decision-making method, pairwise comparison of relative criteria (or alternatives) is applied to rank the final priority. However, considering the benefits (B), opportunities (O), costs (C) and risks (R) of an alternative, and synthesizing the positive criteria of benefits (B) and opportunities (O) and the negative criteria of costs (C) and risks (R) with rating calculation (not pairwise comparison) by a method such as additive, subtractive and multiplicative is a more comprehensive way to deal with a much more complicated problem. Accordingly, AHP associated with BOCR is adopted in the paper to handle this kind of positive and negative criteria in public-oriented projects.

Section snippets

Project evaluation and project management

The issues related to project evaluation and project management have been discussed in various management functions such as research and development, environmental energy management, and quality management. The project selection prior to investment is customarily done using marketing, technical, manufacturing, and financial information in industry. Due to risk uncertainty and limited resources, portfolio decisions were prevailing because of the difficulty of allocating a scarce budget over

Analytic hierarchy process associated with BOCR

The analytic hierarchy process (AHP), proposed by Satty [20], is a simple, mathematically based multi-criteria decision-making tool to deal with complex, unstructured and multi-attribute problems. Saaty [21] further proposed a method to let decision makers to deal with the benefits, opportunities, costs, and risks (the BOCR merits) of a decision. A hierarchy can consist of four sub-hierarchies: benefits, opportunities, costs, and risks.

A systematic AHP model with BOCR is proposed in this

A real case study

According to REL, a wind farm project in China should be implemented by regional government at the discretion of local circumstances. In order to examine the practicality of the project selection model, an anonymous province in China aiming to select a best wind farm is used as an example. The scheme proposes the installation of 500 wind turbines, each with a generating capacity of 2.5 MW, a hub height of 80 m and a blade diameter of 120 m (total height 140 m). In addition, one of the turbines

Conclusion and discussion

It is foreseeable that the move toward generating electricity from renewable wind resources will become the trend in future years. It is surprising that no work has been carried on the selection of such an important project as wind farm in power industry. In addition, because of increasing complexity in social environments along with rapidly changing technologies, integrating critical factors of wind farm to select the best project have a great potential since it does not only considers the

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