Optimizing Site Selection for Interconnected Mini-Grids

Expert-Driven Procedure for Criteria Weight Determination

Abstract

Multiple operational criteria are involved in the selection process of a viable site for an interconnected mini-grid (IMG) project. A challenge at the heart of the process revolves around determining the relative importance or weight or significance of these criteria in the decision-making process. The solution lies in leveraging expert judgment mining, a method that harnesses the knowledge and insights of experts in the field to establish a systematic and robust procedure for assigning relative weights to these criteria. This study aimed to develop an appropriate procedure for determining the relative weights of identified criteria for site selection using experts’ judgment mining. These criteria were carefully chosen to characterize potential sites for IMG projects based on both the characteristics of the proposed sites and the lifetime value of the on-grid customers associated with these sites. The criteria pairwise comparison questionnaire was developed for stakeholders in the electricity supply industry, and experts in renewable energy projects to express their opinions on the relativeness of the criteria. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), integrated with the interval type-2 fuzzy method was used to transform experts’ opinions into criteria and sub-criteria weights, while the reliability of the experts’ opinions was determined using the AHP Consistency Ratio (ACR) test. The ACR reliability threshold infers that the experts’ opinions were consistent and the criteria weights obtained will be suitable in the context of multi-criteria decision-making for renewable energy projects.