Analysis of Selection of Solar Farm Sites with Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Methods in Iran

One way to progress towards sustainable energy is to use solar energy in the world. Iran also has great potential for the use of solar energy, but identifying suitable areas for the construction of solar power plants is an important issue. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the solar energy potential of 9 provincial centers in Iran with 3 multi-criteria decision-making methods Simple Additive Weighting, TOPSIS, and ELECTRE. In this regard, the three main criteria of installation location, weather conditions, and risk have been used, which include 11 sub-criteria and were weighed by the Shanon entropy method. In this weighting, the highest and lowest weights were allocated to population criteria and horizontal radiation, respectively. The results of prioritization also show that Zahedan has priority over other options in all three methods. Zahedan's score in the Simple Additive Weighting method is 0.488904, and in the TOPSIS method is 0.8485 and in the ELECTRE method, Zahedan and Tabriz both with 5 advantages over other Options are a priority, also Tehran was selected as the worst option for the construction of solar power plants, and the score of this option in the Simple Additive Weighting method is 0.167015, in the TOPSIS method 0.4452316 and the ELECTRE method, along with Kerman, without having superiority over other options, were in the last priority. Also, in 6 different cases, sensitivity analysis was performed on the presented models. The results of the sensitivity analysis show that the TOPSIS method is less sensitive to the weights of the indicators than the other two methods.