Evaluation of Solar PV Microgrid Deployment Sustainability in Rural Areas: A fuzzy STEEP Approach

Abstract

In recent times, the sustainability of renewable energy systems has been a concern to energy planners and decision-makers. This interest is because of system failures that are experienced in several communities. The current paper, therefore, uses a Criteria Importance Through Inter-criteria Correlation (CRITIC) - Preference Ranking Organization METHod for Enrichment of Evaluations (PROMETHEE) approach to select a suitable location for microgrid deployment in rural communities. STEEP (social-technical-economic-environmental-policy) criteria were used to select a suitable location for solar microgrid deployment. Three sub-criteria for each of the STEEP criteria were created to achieve this study objective. During the approach implementation, experts' judgments were used to generate relevant data for the proposed model testing. The case study for the model implementation was four rural locations in Nigeria. The model ranked the most and least preferred requirements for solar PV deployment as social and economic requirements, respectively. Also, the model was able to determine the solar PV microgrid sustainability values for the considered rural locations.