A multi-criteria multi-period approach for energy project selection in sustainable development context

The selection of energy projects in sustainable development context must guarantee a long-term balance between maintaining the integrity of the environment, the social equality and the economic efficiency. Energy decision-making problems and specifically project selection decisions are complex. First, multiple conflicting and not commensurable decision criteria (quantitative and/or qualitative) should be taken simultaneously into consideration in the decision-making in problem. Second, the evaluation of sustainable energy projects has to consider short, medium and long term consequences. Thus, projects will be evaluated in an uncertain future and their evaluation should reflect the potential consequences of in uncontrollable events that may occur. The literature review shows that the number of scientific publications related to this research topic is growing and multi-criteria analysis is the most common used approach. However, these research works evaluate projects in a short term perspective without taking into account their impacts over time or the uncertainty scenarios that may impact future evaluations of projects. Furthermore, the great majority of existing multi-criteria approaches do not consider the multi-period long term evaluations of project. This research paper proposes to use multi-criteria decision-aid (MCDA) to address the multi-period and uncertainty aspects of the problem. The outline of a novel multi-criteria multi-period approach that is designed to support sustainable project selection under uncertainty is proposed. More specifically, this paper focuses on: i) presenting a review of the literature of the past five years on sustainable energy project selection, the used methods and the areas of application ii) provide an outline of a novel multi-criteria multi-period approach taking into consideration the requirements of sustainable development in an uncertain future.