Ranking Potential Renewable Energy Systems to Power On-Farm Fertilizer Production

• Main Authors: Ali Mostafaeipour, Ali Sadeghi Sedeh, Shahariar Chowdhury, Kuaanan Techato
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-09-01
• Series: Sustainability
• Subjects: fertilizer production; clean energy; prioritizing; farmlands; sensitivity analysis.
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/19/7850

Farmers across the world have long used chemical fertilizers to achieve higher production outputs. One of the basic inputs for the production of nitrogen fertilizer is fossil fuel, which is not only finite but also has tangible impacts on the environment. This study aims to determine the most suitable renewable energy resource (RER) for the production of fertilizer in Iranian farmlands. The resources considered in this study were photovoltaic energy, biomass energy, wind energy, and solar thermal energy. This assessment was carried out in terms of six general criteria derived from a PESTEL (Political, Economic, Socio-cultural, Technological, Environmental and Legal) analysis, and thus 20 sub-criteria were obtained with the help of experts. The criteria were weighted using the Fuzzy AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) method. Because of the use of criteria with crisp, fuzzy, and interval-type values, the ranking was performed using the extended TODIM (an acronym in Portuguese of interactive and multi-criteria decision-making) method. A sensitivity analysis was performed to determine the effects of the sub-criteria on the results. The results showed that the technological criterion is the most important measure for this assessment, and that photovoltaic energy and wind energy are the top two options for powering chemical fertilizer production in Iranian farmlands.