Developing an AHP based decision model for energy systems policy making

Energy transitions have been increasingly researched as the security of UK´s fossil fuel sources is of major concern for the next years to come. Also, the enforcement of Kyoto Protocol with several other agreements led to the UK´s Carbon Emission Reduction Target (CERT) requiring savings in the amount of CO₂ emitted by households. In fact, there is growing pressure to reduce the amount of emission and the non-renewable resources used. In order for the policy makers to decide on an effective transition pathway which contributes to reaching to the above mentioned objectives, different alternatives need to be compared against each other. This decision has to be made based on a series of socio-technical criteria which are both of quantitative and qualitative nature. This paper proposes a novel decision support tool for decision makers to evaluate the consequences of different energy usage and transition pathways. The proposed tool is based on Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), a Multi Criteria Decision Making Model (MCDM) enabling the users to incorporate both tangible and intangible decision criteria in energy systems policy making which traditionally has mostly been just based on technical aspects of the decision problem.