Photovoltaic with its main characteristics of clean and abundant reserves has been widely used. This paper investigates how to select a satisfactory industrial and commercial rooftop distributed photovoltaic (ICR-DPV) project to invest from the small and medium-sized enterprises’ (SMEs) view. Flaws and inadequacies existing in the current decision-making process may cause an inaccurate investment result. Therefore, this paper establishes a cloud-TODIM framework to deal with the problems. First, criteria covering the economy, resource, risk factors and engineering feasibility are established. Second, hesitant fuzzy linguistic term set (HFLTS) and cloud model are applied to describe the indeterminate information so that the hesitation and randomness of linguistic variables can be fully expressed. Third, the analytic network process (ANP) method and entropy method are combined to gain the criteria weights, which can not only avoid too much subjectivity in weight determination but also measure the mutual influence between the various criteria simultaneously. Furthermore, the TODIM method considers the psychological behavior of investors, so it is utilized to rank alternatives to make the framework more applicable for practical evaluation. Finally, a case in Shandong province validates the applicability of the proposed framework. This paper provides a more rational and scientific decision-making framework for investors.

Introduction

With the explosive growth in 2017, distributed photovoltaic (DPV) has emerged as one of the most energetic and promising new energy industries in China (see Fig. 1), with its advantages of the low power loss and land saving. However, the increasingly prominent subsidy contradictions have become the bottleneck of the PV industry. And the targeted deal, which was implemented on June 1, 2018, arranges a construction scale of about 10 MW to support DPV projects. It plunges the booming PV industry into a transition period and promotes the emergence of new markets. Under this circumstance, the industrial and commercial rooftop distributed PV (ICR-DPV) projects, with the larger and flatter rooftop area and greater power consumption than household rooftops, have received greater attention than ever (Wu et al., 2018b). More importantly, even without subsidies, the electricity bill saved by DPV generation system can also reduce the burden of business expenses. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play an important role in China’ economy as they contribute more than 50% of China’s tax revenue and more than 60% of GDP. However, the continuous escalation of Sino-US trade conflicts has brought serious and even fatal effects to a number of SMEs. In addition, China is entering a new stage of reform, but the development of SMEs is still confronted with an austere challenge. Thus, it is extremely urgent to seek a way out for the small and medium-sized PV enterprises under the double impact of the new deal and Sino-US trade war.