Future Energy Mix Mapping for Jordan using Multi Criteria Decision Analysis

Jordan is one of the most hydrocarbon-poor countries in the Middle East, with neither significant production of oil nor natural gas. It relies heavily on imported oil and gas for power generation. This let energy remains Jordan’s top challenge. In its future energy strategy, Jordan pledged to diversify its energy supply by increasing domestic sources contribution to the total energy mix. The available alternatives vary from conventional energy sources including natural gas power plants, nuclear power, and oil shale to renewable energy comprising PV power plants, wind energy, and concentrated solar power plants. This makes it a very challenging task for the decision makers to choose in which track to invest more heavily than others. This paper uses Multi Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) to accomplish this goal. MCDA are techniques used to compare a number of alternatives using monetized, quantitative or qualitative criteria. Six options were compared; new CCGT plants, nuclear power plants, oil shale direct combustion, wind turbines, PV technology, and Concentrating Solar Power (CSP). The value tree of the objectives was constructed with five high level factors that each option is evaluated against that include the aspects of environmental, economic, political, social, and technical. These factors are then broken down into 15 performance criteria. Criteria used for the evaluation were CO2 emissions, external costs, visual impact, noise, capital cost, operation and maintenance costs, fuel costs, cost of generated electricity, water requirements, promotion of renewables, jobs creation, capacity factor, predictability, and hybridization. Results show that renewable energy technologies outperform conventional ones in terms of the overall weighted score. In the renewables; PV technology come first with overall weighted score of 84.89 out of 100. CSP energy come second with this score of 64.61 while wind energy scored 61.14. The overall weighted score for the conventional technologies of natural gas, nuclear, and oil shale power plants were 31.57, 324.17 and 26.94 respectively. Conclusions withdrawn from this research work are that power supply systems based on renewable technologies, will play a greater role in generating electricity in Jordan and are the most preferred options to invest more heavily in to diversify the future energy mix and that MCDA is a great tool serving decision makers in their energy sector policies that can handle complex decision-making problems.