Sustainable development contribution assessment of renewable energy projects using AHP and compromise programming techniques

In the face of the double whammy of energy crisis and environmental impact of conventional power plants, renewable energy sources come to the rescue. The international community is in search for mechanisms to abet climate change issues. Flexible mechanisms like Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) evaluate sustainable development contribution of the energy projects for granting financial assistance. In case of projects competing for same source of investment, a project having a higher positive contribution to sustainable development is given priority. In the absence of reliable data, the process is overwhelmingly qualitative and hence presents a bottleneck in the decision making process. The present study proposes multi-criteria decision making techniques for quantitative evaluation of sustainability. A set of sustainable development objectives and criteria are selected. Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) is used for determination of criteria weights. Compromise Programming (CP) is used for comparing projects across criteria. Four registered CDM projects are used for illustrating the proposed approach.