The Potential of Renewable Energy Sources in Providing Sustainable Power for Natural Disaster Zones: TOPSIS Method for Gaziantep, Turkey

Renewable energies (REs) can be a reliable and sustainable source of energy for communities affected by natural disasters. The present work investigates the potential of wind and solar in providing sustainable energy for natural disaster areas with a focus on Gaziantep, Turkey. This study aims to find the optimal scenario based on REs using the TOPSIS method. It also evaluates the feasibility of implementing solar and wind to supply the required electricity. Four different scenarios are compared based on 25-year energy-economic-environmental analyses using HOMER v2.81 software. The simulation outputs are weighted by the opinions of 10 renewable experts and classified into Beneficial and Non-Beneficial categories. The results of the energy-economic-environmental analyses showed that the cheapest electricity produced with a price of 0.426 $/kWh in the scenario of solar cell-diesel generator-battery (scenario one). The most environmentally friendly scenario, the wind turbine-solar cell-diesel generator-battery scenario (scenario three), had about 1054.3 tons/year of pollutant reduction compared to the conventional scenario of only using diesel generator (scenario four). The ranking results indicate that the best scenarios are scenario one, followed by scenario three and scenario two, even though scenario three has the highest scores in parameters of renewable fraction, losses, pollutants and excess electricity.