Causal Investigation for Determining Critical Success Factors of Hydropower Plants by Considering Two-Dimensional Uncertain Linguistic Variables

Hydropower is recognized as one of the renewable energy sources, which can be classified as clean energy source. For the sustainability of the environment, it is considered as one of the most efficient energy sources for the especially supply of the electricity to the residences, stores, industrial facilities etc. For the hydropower plants, many factors can be considered as have an impact on the process and should be taken into account for sustainability of environment. Moreover, these factors can be conflicting and depended with each other. Evaluation of such a system also consists of both qualitative and quantitative data. During the evaluation process, there can be uncertainty, which occurs due to lack of information, imprecision and human’s hesitancy. Through the evaluation of the hydropower plant’s critical success factors with respect to mentioned environment, an integrated decision making methodology consists of DEMATEL and cognitive mapping based on hesitant fuzzy z-numbers has been suggested. For the preliminary study, 29 factors are determined for the evaluation. Through the application, the factors "Availability of Water", "Annual flow", "Technology", "Capacity", and "Annual energy production" are determined as the most influential factors among the other based on the constructed context, respectively.