Multi-criteria Decision Analysis Methods for Sustainability Assessment and Improvement of Energy Systems Under Uncertainties

2021 ◽  
pp. 161-193
Author(s):  
Xusheng Ren ◽  
Lichun Dong ◽  
Jingzheng Ren
Keyword(s):  
Decision Analysis ◽  
Sustainability Assessment ◽  
Energy Systems ◽  
Multi Criteria Decision Analysis ◽  
Analysis Methods

scholarly journals Integrated Multidimensional Sustainability Assessment of Energy System Transformation Pathways

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 5217
Author(s):  
Tobias Naegler ◽  
Lisa Becker ◽  
Jens Buchgeister ◽  
Wolfgang Hauser ◽  
Heidi Hottenroth ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Analysis ◽  
Sustainability Assessment ◽  
System Modeling ◽  
Energy Systems ◽  
Holistic Approach ◽  
Energy System ◽  
Climate Impact ◽  
System Transformation ◽  
Multi Criteria Decision Analysis ◽  
Transformation Pathways

Sustainable development embraces a broad spectrum of social, economic and ecological aspects. Thus, a sustainable transformation process of energy systems is inevitably multidimensional and needs to go beyond climate impact and cost considerations. An approach for an integrated and interdisciplinary sustainability assessment of energy system transformation pathways is presented here. It first integrates energy system modeling with a multidimensional impact assessment that focuses on life cycle-based environmental and macroeconomic impacts. Then, stakeholders’ preferences with respect to defined sustainability indicators are inquired, which are finally integrated into a comparative scenario evaluation through a multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), all in one consistent assessment framework. As an illustrative example, this holistic approach is applied to the sustainability assessment of ten different transformation strategies for Germany. Applying multi-criteria decision analysis reveals that both ambitious (80%) and highly ambitious (95%) carbon reduction scenarios can achieve top sustainability ranks, depending on the underlying energy transformation pathways and respective scores in other sustainability dimensions. Furthermore, this research highlights an increasingly dominant contribution of energy systems’ upstream chains on total environmental impacts, reveals rather small differences in macroeconomic effects between different scenarios and identifies the transition among societal segments and climate impact minimization as the most important stakeholder preferences.

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