Strategic feasibility outlook for blue energy investments using an integrated decision-making approach

Abstract

Conducting feasibility analysis in blue energy investments is very critical to provide performance analysis of the projects. However, a significant portion of the studies in the literature focus on general energy projects. Nevertheless, there are not enough studies for a more specific area such as blue energy. This situation significantly increases the need for this type of priority analysis. Accordingly, the purpose of this study is to identify the most appropriate strategies to increase the effectiveness of the feasibility analysis of blue energy investments via a novel decision-making model. In the first stage of the model, the importance levels of experts are computed using machine learning technique. The second stage includes weighting the feasibility criteria set for blue energy project investment by Fermatean fuzzy entropy. After that, the strategic alternatives for increasing the capacity of blue energy projects are ranked with Fermatean fuzzy CoCoSo. The main contribution of this study to the literature is making a detailed evaluation to generate appropriate strategies for the feasibility analysis of the blue energy investments via a novel decision-making model. The integration of AI system provides some advantages to the proposed model. In this way, the decision matrix is obtained by calculating the importance weights of each expert. This situation allows to have more accurate analysis results. It is defined that the technological infrastructure of the company plays the most critical role (weight: 0.173) when conducting feasibility analysis for blue energy investments. Similarly, it is also identified that the financial performance of the business (weight: 0.172) is also important to conduct a more successful feasibility analysis for blue energy investments. On the other side, the ranking results demonstrate that collaborating with the investment-ready companies for increasing the innovative technologies is the most appropriate strategy to increase the capacity of blue energy projects.