Decision support system for barrier assessment

Abstract

Newswise — Addressing Africa’s energy infrastructure gap, including generation, distribution, and transmission, requires significant investment, some of which will go to renewable energy technologies such as wind power. A significant scale-up of wind power has the potential to deliver significant socio-economic benefits to countries. However, there are barriers that, if not addressed, could hinder its adoption and expansion across the continent. For the first time, this study assesses these barriers and related policies for its implementation using spherical fuzzy sets (SFS), which allows modeling of uncertainty in assessments while reducing bias. The study presents a decision support system that incorporates the Best Worst Method (BWM), Criteria Importance Through Inter-criteria Correlation (CRITIC), and VIšeKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR) in a spherical fuzzy set (SF) framework. Five alternative policies were considered and to rank them, 23 barriers were identified and divided into five main groups based on literature review and expert opinion. Then, BWM and SF-CRITIC methods were used to establish both subjective and objective weights for these barriers. Finally, SF-VIKOR method was used to rank the five alternative policies. While the most critical barriers include “Not in My Backyard” (NIMBY) concerns, limited subsidies compared to fossil fuels, lack of institutions and information dissemination mechanisms, non-liberalized market and shortage of key human resources, the most suitable policy remains the Renewable Obligation Standard (ROS). Sensitivity analysis was used to demonstrate the robustness of the proposed methodology.