A New Integrated Approach for Determination of Turkey’s Solar Energy Production Strategies: The Fuzzy Expanded SWOT

Abstract

Solar energy is one of the most important renewable energy types which are invested in Turkey because the country has high solar energy potential due to its geographical location and solar energy has apparent advantages. Due to the current importance of the issue, determining the strategies related to Turkey's solar energy production is aimed in this study. For this, a new integrated method called the Fuzzy Expanded SWOT which consists of the Fuzzy AHP and the Expanded SWOT methods has been proposed. The proposed method eliminates many disadvantages of the traditional SWOT analysis. First of all, factors and sub-factors related to solar energy were determined using the Expanded SWOT analysis. Subsequently, the local weights of these factors and sub-factors were determined using the Fuzzy AHP method. The sub-factors which are insignificant according to the weights found were eliminated and the global weights of the remaining sub-factors were found. Sub-factors were prioritized according to their global weights and strategies were determined according to the Expanded SWOT matrix considering these priorities. Finally, the sensitivity analysis has been performed to see the effect of the different weights given to the SWOT factors on the strategies created. As a result of the analyzes, a total of 9 strategies have been determined and it was observed that the strategies which should be dwelled on related to solar energy production in Turkey, are ones that concentrate on R&D studies in public institutions, private sector, and universities. According to the sensitivity analysis which is performed for 3 additional scenarios, it was seen that the weights of the SWOT factors changed the direction of the strategies