IDENTIFYING AND RANKING ENERGY SOURCES IN ELECTRICITY INDUSTRY BASED ON THE PRINCIPLES OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT WITH GREY RELATIONAL ANALYSIS

Nowadays supply chain management and following it supplier selection has become a vital and eective topic. This issue in major industries such as power industry is more signicant. In recent decades, determining the most appropriate energy suppliers is considered as a strategic factor in the supply chain of country's electricity industry to move towards sustainable development. The massive increase consumption of fossil fuels for producing electricity during the 20th century was accompanied by several problems in economic, social and environmental levels. Thus, the energy as it is produced, distributed and consumed currently does not meet the requirements of sustainable development. Power industry plays a signicant role in achieving economic development and welfare of a country. Therefore, predicting a bright and reliable future for it is very important. Traditionally, organizations consider criteria such as price, quality, exibility, etc. when evaluating supplier performance. While the articles on the selection and evaluation of suppliers are abundant, those that consider sustainability issues are rather limited. The main purpose of this research is to rank energy suppliers in electricity industry based on the principles of sustainable development. For this purpose, a comprehensive review of literature and doing some exploratory interviews with academic experts and experts of Renewable Energy Organization of Iran (SUNA) was performed and main factors aecting the sustainability assessment of energy suppliers were recognized. Then the experts working in SUNA as our research's decision makers judged and evaluated the energy suppliers via a survey based on 20 Qualitative criteria. We used grey number to express linguistic values of expert's subjective preferences and GRA (Grey Relational Analysis) technique to rank suppliers.in this research Criteria of energy supplier evaluation are summarized from environmental, social, economic, technical and political-governmental aspects that are the ve dominant aspects of energy sustainable development .Results indicate that natural gas, solar energy and wind power are ranked rst to third among the options allocated to power generation.