Decision Analysis Related to Solar Farms Investments Based on AHP & Fuzzy AHP for Sustainable Energy Production

Renewable solar energy is the most preferable clean energy source with no environmental impacts. The Marrakech Safi region (Morocco) context, with its arid and semi-arid climate, can ensure sustainable energy production oriented to green economy. The paper aims to perform a decision analysis using the Analysis Hierarchical Process (AHP) and Fuzzy AHP to identify the potential areas for solar farms. The adopted approaches used fifteen factors to produce two suitability maps. Fuzzy logic was used to minimize the subjectivity related to the factor notation. The factors’ weights were reevaluated using the sensitivity analysis (SA) to assess their influence by comparing the theoretical and the effective weights. SA was conducted to explain the difference between the models. Results show that the suitable areas to host the solar farms cover more than 35% (1,300 Ha) of the region, using AHP and F-AHP. Moreover, the similarity analysis performed demonstrated that the 32% unequal areas between AHP and F-AHP can be explained by the factors’ weights and the difference of the approaches used. The climatic potential and the geographic location of the study area offer a large suitable area for exploiting solar farms. Findings constitute decision-making support for stakeholders for solar farm investments