Assessing the most feasible 100W solar panel under multi-criteria perspective

The demands for renewable energy sources have been growing progressively in this century due to sustained industrial development, reduction of fossil fuels and awareness on environmental. The solar energy has been one of the quickest developing resources of sustainable energy on the market today. The backbone element of a photovoltaic system is the solar panel. There has been numerous effort by researchers worldwide cooperating to reduce the material costs of photovoltaic panels, produce efficient novel products and improve their energy efficiency, procreate innovative practices based on photovoltaic system design technology. In this paper, the AHP method was applied to choose the most feasible 100W solar panel for a photovoltaic system design. Five diverse solar panel brands were analyzed and specialists’ choices were based on five characteristics of the panels: i) electrical, ii) mechanical iii) financial, iv) environmental, v) customer. These characteristics were considered in order to determine relative priorities. Because of a compact analysis through multi-criteria decision making method, it was found that third panel (P3) was determined to be the most feasible 100W solar panel (0, 279). Photovoltaic panel data used in this study is obtained from the top panel firms worldwide.