Optimal location selection for offshore wind-PV-seawater pumped storage power plant using a hybrid MCDM approach: A two-stage framework.

• A new field of offshore wind-PV-seawater pumped storage site selection is studied. • A comprehensive and novel location selection criteria system is proposed. • An extended fuzzy TODIM based two-stage decision making framework is established. • Model's effectiveness is verified by a practical case in China. • This study fills the deficiency of renewable energy research to a certain extent. Constructing an economical wind-PV-seawater pumped storage (SPS) plant is crucial to promote the complementarity of wind and PV resources in time and space dimensions and to reduce energy abandonment caused by voltage instability. It is also beneficial to realizing long-time sustainable development objectives for offshore areas and even for the whole country. To select the optimal site of wind-PV-SPS power plants with massive difficulties lying in different attitudes of decision makers to loss risk, uncertainties of decision-making environment and various attributes of evaluation alternatives, a fuzzy multi criteria decision making based a two-stage evaluation mode is proposed. Firstly, two sets of criteria systems, representing veto selection of regional resources and the conditions of sustainable development described by triangular intuitionistic fuzzy numbers (TIFNs), are established to ensure the scientificality and comprehensiveness of the evaluation process. Then, alternatives are preliminarily selected through veto identification. Afterwards, criteria weights of the second evaluation stage determined by the entropy method are incorporated within TODIM (an acronym in Portuguese of interactive and multiple attribute decision making) to rank potential wind-PV-SPS objects. Finally, to validate the effectiveness of the proposed model, a case study in China is conducted and the calculation result shows that Qingtian Bay in Zhou Shan is the best. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]