Assessment of the challenges to renewable energy technologies adoption in rural areas: A Fermatean CRITIC-VIKOR approach

Adopting renewables has recently become a critical topic due to climate change, global warming, and scarcity of fossil fuels, encouraging some nations to use fossil fuels as weapons against other countries, especially the EU. Thus, the present study investigates the challenges of adopting renewable energy technologies in rural areas as they are more vulnerable to dealing with the above issues. To this end, firstly, challenges are identified through a literature review and are evaluated using Fermatean-CRITIC to determine their significance. Subsequently, a systematic literature review on the application of multicriteria decision analysis in the renewables sector is conducted, then a novel Fermatean-VIKOR is applied to rank four district government offices according to the weighted challenges. The results indicated that the most significant challenge to renewable energy technologies adoption is “public engagement” out of eight identified challenges. Also, a sensitivity analysis is conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed Fermatean-CRITIC-VIKOR according to the weight changes.