Identifying significant points of energy culture for developing sustainable energy investments

Abstract

Serious environmental problems occur as a result of the unconscious production and use of energy. Hence, there is a strong need to develop an effective energy culture to provide sustainability for the energy investments. This study aims to identify the influence directions of dimensions and criteria for energy culture in emerging economies for sustainable energy investments. For this purpose, a multi-criteria decision-making model is proposed based on 2-tuple linguistic values and interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets. The weighting results of energy culture are also evaluated for E7 economies. The findings demonstrate that energy companies should consider investing in technologies, assets, and objects which enable to reproduce energy usage. Furthermore, the analysis revealed that there is a misalignment of practices with material culture and norms what creates the potential for behavior change of consumers. Finally, the potential of bigger countries for investment opportunities in sustainable energies has been disclosed by ranking emerging economies. The results let us provide insights into development of energy investments by considering strategic priorities of energy culture in emerging economies. The novelty of this paper is to define a set of criteria and dimensions for the strategic priorities of energy culture in emerging economies and construct a novel decision-making technique with DEMATEL and TOPSIS based on 2-tuple and interval-valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets.