Evaluating renewable and sustainable energy impeding factors using an integrated fuzzy-grey decision approach

The provision of adequate, affordable, and sustainable electricity has become a dream for Pakistani people. In this modern era, people in Pakistan face up to 18 h of power outage a day. To overcome the energy shortage, efforts are already being made to exploit the country's abundantly available renewable energy (RE) alternatives. However, results achieved so far are not remarkable since the development is impeded by numerous barriers. These barriers are complex, and their significance varies from one alternative to another. Therefore, it is vital to quantify their impact on each alternative as conducted in this study. Initially, the study finalizes barriers related to the scope of this study using Fuzzy Delphi. Later, Grey Analytical Hierarchy Process (G-AHP) is employed to first find the relative importance of barriers and then evaluate RE alternatives under each barrier. Finally, the ranking of alternatives based on overall barriers is obtained. Policy and Regulatory barriers found to be more significant. Whereas, Solar energy faces cumulatively less barriers and therefore tops the ranking followed respectively by Micro-hydro, Biomass, Wind, Municipal Solid Waste, and Geothermal. Based on findings, a new set of policy guidelines are proposed to help speed up the deployment of RE in Pakistan.