Multiple criteria decision making for power generation investment planning under restrictions of aggregate emission control

This article addresses the economic decision of generating investment planning in order to determine the cost effectiveness of environmental options. The approach of linear programming (LP) with multiple criteria decision making is deployed in analyzing available options to formulate a model in compliance with the recent environmental trends of aggregate emission control from a long-term perspective. An LP model is developed to find the best solution and to decide suitable environmental options. The use of the multiple objective approach is to determine the cost interactions between capital limitations and emission quantities from a long-term cost-effective viewpoint. Each environmental option is first graphed to analyze its effects through a load duration curve and then all the options are mathematically formulated in a cost minimization model followed by model implementation. The implementation is designed as several scenarios to survey the parameter variations of energy production and escalation factors. The implementation results demonstrate that the use of both LP and multiple objective models could help utility planners easily explain the theoretical rigor not found in simpler decision models.