This paper is focused on defining a sustainability assessment of power plants integrating different classes of indicators (selection criteria) in an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) analyzing ten different basic power plants considered among the most affordable in the actual technical and social panorama considering fossil and nuclear fuels as well as renewable sources. The approach is based on different levels of criteria. Tangibles and intangibles are considered at first. Different depth of classes are considered in the proposed AHP framework in order to better face the different nature of the managed indicators. At the bottom of the tree appear the ten considered power plants options. The proposed approach has to be considered a sort of basic framework, a guidance for future applications requiring specific definition and management of data available in the explicit field considered where this methodology can turn into an useful tool for the assessment of energy system in the engineering practice. In this case, a further sensitivity analysis should be performed in order to best fit the model to the considered context.

The aim of the proposed paper consists in defining an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) able to integrate different classes of indicators (selection criteria) in order to assess the sustainability of five basic energy systems. The criteria (market, performance, environmental and social indicators) are located at the second level of hierarchy tree proposed and they are decomposed in specific sub-indicators which represent the sub-criteria situated at the third level. At the bottom of the tree appear the five alternatives selected and compared: phosphoric acid fuel cells (PAFC), solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC), natural gas turbine (GT), photovoltaic (PV) and wind energy systems (WE). Reference data used to perform the evaluation procedure have been collected and integrated from current technical and scientific literature. A sensitivity analysis allows the evaluation of different scenarios by changing, step by step, the relative perceptual importance of criteria and sub-criteria.