Building public confidence in energy planning: a multimethod MCDM approach to demand management at BC Gas

Energy supply and demand-side resource selection processes often must involve stakeholders, with the purposes of informing them of technical options and tradeoffs, and asking them for value judgments. Multicriteria decision making (MCDM) methods are one means of quantifying stakeholder judgments, but the way in which such methods are usually applied can cause stakeholders to feel manipulated by a "black-box" methodology. The paper discusses the application of an innovative approach specifically intended to grapple with the complexity of resource selection while mitigating the black-box phenomenon. The procedure has each person apply two or more methods and then asks them to resolve differences in the results in order to build understanding and confidence in the process. The approach recognizes that different MCDM methods can yield significantly different decisions, and that no one method is best for every person. We describe a successful application by a diverse stakeholder group of the iterative multimethod process. The results confirm that the rankings yielded by alternative MCDM methods can disagree, and that a multimethod approach builds stakeholder understanding and confidence.