ABSTRACT
With increasing awareness about the negative effects of industrialization, the world is moving from non-renewable to renewable sources of energy. All over the world, there is stress on finding cheap and widely available sources of power. Solar energy is the leader in renewable sources of energy the world over. As countries and corporates are participating in installing more solar projects than ever, it becomes important to evaluate the efficacy of resources used in the solar projects. In this paper, we devise a novel methodology to compare solar energy projects on the basis of a few relevant parameters. We integrate Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Fuzzy TOPSIS and DEA-Fuzzy COPRAS to shortlist and rank solar energy projects. First, DEA is used to identify energy projects which lie at the technology frontier in terms of efficiency. Thereafter, shortlisted efficient projects are separately ranked using Fuzzy TOPSIS and Fuzzy COPRAS to identify projects which use the resources in the best possible manner. Using two different methodologies in the second stage separately enables us to compare and validate our ranking system. Our methodology can also be adapted to evaluate other types of energy sources.
