Capacity planning for fossil fuel and renewable energy resources power plants

Abstract

Electricity industry is changing by organizational and legislative evolutions dealing with economical and environmental affairs. Besides rapid development in energy generation decreased the related variable costs, considering environmental issues. In this study energy generation technologies are evaluated both from economical and environmental views. Applying Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) which is extremely applicable and known as one of the efficient methods to analyze complicated multi criteria problems it is achieved interesting results from evaluation. The main goal of this evaluation which is presented in this essay is to extract total preference weights for generation technology. Total preference weights are determined considering four criteria in fossil fuel power plants and renewable energy resources power plant using this evaluation pattern. For three power plant of gas, steam and combine cycle the total preference weights are calculated by considering seven criteria. For the next eight power plants of wind, small hydro, photovoltaic, solar thermal, micro turbine, biomass, geothermal and fuel cell total preference weights is considered according to seven criteria. Optimum capacity is calculated and determined. Sensitivity analysis is made on two most important criteria of this model named 1- operation and investment cost, and 2-fossil resources scarcity for power plants. 1- Multiple criteria of objective function, 2-possibility of sensitivity analysis on criteria weights and 3-concurrent inspection of qualitative and quantitative criteria in optimization of objective function are three advantages of the proposed model comparing common applying method such as (mono- objective software WASP)