Evaluation of installing photovoltaic plants using a hybrid approach for Khuzestan province, Iran

Iran is one of the countries that enjoys remarkable solar energy potential; thus, the shift toward solar energy utilizations offers numerous environmental advantages. This research aims to perform a technical-economic feasibility study on the construction of Photovoltaic power plants in 14 areas of Khuzestan province using HOMER software and by using a hybrid approach composed of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and Game Theory (GT) to rank the selected areas. The proposed hybrid approach outperforms the simple DEA by its ability to acquire more accurate results in order to distinguish the relationships between decision-making components and criteria. Technical-economic feasibility study is conducted by gathering the information related to the solar resources for each candidate site, selecting the required equipment and then simulating these plants in HOMER software. The outputs of the software included the type of equipment to be used in the construction of each plant, benefit, cost, total net capital expenditure, depreciation cost and the amount of electricity generated by each plant. After solving the hybrid model composed of DEA, BSC and Game theory by Lingo, candidate sites were ranked based on four criteria: the net cost of construction, earnings, the amount of power generated, and pollution produced per plant. According to the results, the sites of Abadan, Omidiyeh, and Aghajari gained the highest ranks, and the sites of Behbahan and Ahwaz gained the lowest rank. In addition, the validation results show that ranking gained by the proposed hybrid approach is almost same as the simple DEA method.