A Novel Mixed Integer Programming Formulation for Selecting the Best Renewable Energies to Invest

Abstract

The governments seeking to invest renewable energies for electrifying far spots and/or isolated islands are always confronted with the problem of selecting the best energy (portfolio of energies) technology. To reach the optimum decision, they must take into account a variety of criteria including technical, economic, environmental and social aspects at the same time. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to address the mentioned concern by developing a multi objective mixed integer programming formulation that not only takes into account the above criteria with a focus on tax, depreciation costs and time value of money, but also optimizes a set of objective functions simultaneously. Furthermore, to model the intrinsic uncertainty of some parameters like demand and budget, a fuzzy goal programming approach is applied. In order to demonstrate the applicability of the model, a numerical example, based on the data obtained from the literature, is developed. The results indicate that, for the given conditions, hydro and PV are superior to their counterparts.