New framework prioritizes power expansion projects under disruption

A new assessment framework designed for renewable-integrated power systems found that projects favored on resilience alone can look stronger while overlooking major sustainability effects. Applied to 74 generation-expansion alternatives in Iran’s Sistan and Baluchestan province, the method ranked projects by combining disruption-responsive resilience, severe-stress vulnerability, capital cost, renewable share and the interdependent relationships among decision criteria. The study describes a planning framework rather than a demonstration that a particular energy system or project produces measurable public benefits.

The proposed approach, called Scenario-Adjusted Resilient-Sustainable Assessment and Comprehensive Distance-Based Ranking, or SARSA-COBRA, was developed to address a limitation of existing project-prioritization methods. Such approaches commonly treat effective criteria as independent or retain fixed importance values, making it difficult to represent how resilience and sustainability drivers interact when disruptions differ in severity. The framework instead converts those relationships into coalition-based marginal contributions, allowing each project’s score to reflect both its individual characteristics and its position within a connected assessment system.

At the center of the method is Single-Valued Neutrosophic DEMATEL, which identifies the causal structure among resilient-sustainable variables. A proposed Causal-Synergy Shapley Game then transforms that structure into weights reflecting systemic prominence, causal dominance and internal causal synergy. Scenario activation adjusts the resulting contributions for four specified disruption conditions: Normal, Mild, Moderate and Severe. The researchers combined these scenario-sensitive results with the Integrated Power System Resilience and Vulnerability Index, capital cost and renewable share through the COBRA method to produce a comparative expansion priority for the predefined projects.

In the 74-project case study, excluding sustainability contributions produced an apparent increase of 9.88% in resilience and a 20.26% increase in vulnerability. The result illustrates the model’s central concern: an assessment that omits sustainability-related interactions may report stronger system performance without capturing vulnerabilities associated with the broader generation portfolio. The study did not report that changing the projects or operating the power system would cause these numerical shifts; the percentages are comparative outputs generated under the framework’s assessment rules.

Project rankings also changed substantially when the wider set of criteria was included. Only 20% of the ten alternatives that ranked highest in the performance assessment remained among the COBRA-prioritized expansion projects. This means that eight of the ten performance leaders were displaced in the combined ranking, which also accounts for disruption-responsive performance, vulnerability under severe stress, investment burden and renewable contribution. The case study therefore shows that a resilience-oriented ranking can differ markedly from a planning-oriented ranking that treats financial and sustainability considerations as integral rather than supplementary.

Although the findings offer a structured way to compare generation investments under different disruption scenarios, the evidence comes from one modeled application with a predefined set of alternatives in a single Iranian province. The source does not establish that SARSA-COBRA is optimal, that the selected projects will be built, or that the framework will yield the same rank changes elsewhere. Its demonstrated contribution is methodological: it offers planners a way to expose hidden trade-offs among interdependent resilience and sustainability criteria, test their sensitivity to disruption severity and present a consolidated project priority without presenting any of the modeled quantities as a realized outcome.

Subject of Research: Multi-criteria assessment of renewable-integrated generation expansion projects under disruption scenarios

Article Title: A resilient-sustainable assessment framework for prioritization of generation expansion projects

Article References: Khaksefidi, M., Esfahanipour, A., & Gharehpetian, G. B. (2026). A resilient-sustainable assessment framework for prioritization of generation expansion projects. Scientific Reports. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-76764-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-76764-7

Keywords: energy systems, power generation, renewable energy, system resilience, vulnerability, sustainability, project prioritization, DEMATEL, Shapley game, Sistan and Baluchestan, resilient-sustainable, assessment