Given Morocco’s geographical position and climatic conditions, solar energy will supply a large portion of the country’s energy demand. In this paper, the suitability of Moroccan lands for hosting Solar Power Plants was studied using the combination of the Geographic Information System (GIS) and the Analytical Hierarchy Method (AHP). The multi-criteria decision framework integrates technical, socio-economic and environmental constraints. For this purpose, a GIS database was created using layers from various sources. In addition, since the potential of Global Horizontal Irradiation (GHI) is the most relevant criterion for the selection of solar farms, a high-quality solar satellite map with a spatial resolution of 0.27 km was used, covering a period from 1994 to 2018. Obtained results show a great potential for solar energy development in Morocco, represented by the availability of 90% of areas. In fact, the resulting map was classified into 6 different classes, namely: Very high suitability, High suitability, Moderate suitability, Low suitability, Very low suitability and Exclusion areas, which 53.88%, 24.08%, 0.15%, 0%, 0% and 21.89% are respectively the percentages of their area occupation. According to the performed investigations, the most significant criteria that should be considered include: The Global Horizontal Irradiation, Slope, Temperature and Slope orientation. The obtained map was then compared to the existing solar farms, and show that all the existing projects are located within areas classified as highly suitable.

Motivated by the concepts of low carbon and environmental protection, electric vehicles have received much attention and become more and more popular all around the world. The expanding demand for electric vehicles has driven the rapid development of the charging pile industry. One of the prominent issues in charging pile industry is to determine their sites, which is a complex decision-making problem. As a matter of factor, the process of charging piles sites selection can be regarded as multi-attribute group decision-making (MAGDM), which is the main topic of this paper. The recently proposed linguistic spherical fuzzy sets (LSFSs) composed of the linguistic membership degree, linguistic abstinence degree and linguistic non-membership degree are powerful tools to express the evaluation information of decision makers (DMs). Based on the concept of LSFSs, we introduce probabilistic multi-valued linguistic spherical fuzzy sets (PMVLSFSs), which can describe DMs’ fuzzy evaluation information in a more refined and accurate way. The operation rules of PMVLSFSs are also developed in this article. To effectively aggregate PMVLSFSs, the probabilistic multi-valued linguistic spherical fuzzy power generalized Maclaurin symmetric mean operator and the probabilistic multi-valued linguistic spherical fuzzy power weighted generalized Maclaurin symmetric mean are put forward. Based on the above aggregation operators, a new method for MAGDM problem with PMVLSFSs is established. Further, a practical case of suitable site selection of charging pile is used to verify the practicability of this method. Lastly, comparative analysis with other methods is performed to illustrate the advantages and stability of proposed method.