A linguistic TOPSIS model to evaluate the sustainability of renewable energy options

Renewable Energy Sources (RES) could be used to reduce carbon emissions, decrease dependence on fossil fuels and meet energy policy objectives towards Sustainable Development (SD). However, appraising the RES options' contribution to SD is a complex task, considering the different aspects of SD and the uncertainty of related information. The paper's objective is to extend the numerical multicriteria method TOPSIS for processing linguistic data in the form of 2-tuples, so as to show how energy policy objectives towards SD and RES are assessed using linguistic variables. Moreover, the application of the proposed method to the Greek energy market is presented.