Multi-dimensional sustainability assessment framework for offshore wind energy: A game-theoretic and extenics-based approach

Offshore wind power is a key pillar of the clean-energy transition, yet ensuring the sustainability of projects demands rigorous multi-dimensional assessment. Current evaluation frameworks often focus on single aspects (e.g., economic or environmental) and suffer from subjectivity in weight assignments and poor handling of uncertainty. Here we propose a novel comprehensive assessment framework that integrates four critical dimensions - technological innovation, market dynamics, policy support, and safety resilience - to evaluate offshore wind sustainability. Methodologically, we introduce a dynamic weighting mechanism that innovatively applies game theory to harmonize objective (CRITIC) and subjective (Anti-entropy) weighting schemes within a Nash equilibrium framework, ensuring a stable and balanced representation of indicator importance. We integrate a pioneering matter-element Extenics cloud model to quantitatively characterize the coupled fuzziness and randomness of multi-dimensional indicators, significantly enhancing the framework's robustness in managing uncertainty and supporting complex sustainability evaluations. Applying this to China's four major offshore regions reveals distinct sustainability profiles: East China leads with the highest scores in innovation and policy support, while other regions lag due to resource and policy gaps. These findings provide tailored insights for regional development and demonstrate the value of our quantitative, multi-dimensional decision-support tool for guiding sustainable offshore wind development globally.