An integrated solution with SWARA&COPRAS methods in renewable energy production: City selection for biogas facility

Abstract In today's world, where the demand for energy has increased and the supply/demand balance for energy has become increasingly difficult, the role of renewable energy is quite important. One of the most important sources of renewable energy in the world is the biogas, which offers great contributions to prevent environmental pollution and ensure ecological balance. Because Turkey has the necessary resources for the production of biogas, it is a popular country for the establishment of biogas production facility, which has a great importance from renewable energy sources. The aim of this study is appropriate city selection for a new biogas facility which will be an alternative to already existing biogas production facilities in Turkey. The study focuses on the identification of renewable energy potentials by evaluating 3 cities with rich and diverse characteristics in terms of biomass quantity. In this paper, a model with 12 criteria which affects the evaluation of the alternatives is proposed for selecting the suitable city in Turkey for biogas production with proposed solution method. In proposed methodology, the SWARA method, which uses the ranking of each decision maker, is used in the first phase of the solution in which the importance weights of the criteria in the model are determined. After obtaining criteria weights with SWARA method, for selecting appropriate city to establish a biogas facility, COPRAS method is used that is a one of multi criteria decision making method. The proposed model is showed by an illustrative example and the results are explained.