The aim of this study is to evaluate investment decisions for the renewable energy (RE) alternatives. For this purpose, balanced scorecard (BSC)-based 4 dimensions and 8 criteria are identified. Additionally, 5 different RE investment alternatives (biomass, hydropower, geothermal, wind and solar) are examined. DEMATEL method is used to weight these dimensions and criteria whereas RE investment alternatives are weighted by TOPSIS approach. The novelty of this study is that comparative analysis is applied by considering standard fuzzy, interval type-2 (IT2) fuzzy and IT2 hesitant fuzzy (HF) sets. The findings show that competition is the most significant dimension and persistence of research and development is the most important criterion. Furthermore, it is also determined that solar and wind energies have the best performance, but geothermal energy is on the last rank. Therefore, it is recommended that level of the competition in the RE markets should be mainly taken into the consideration by the investors. In other words, investors may have loss in this RE market when there is high competition. Another important point is that investors should also give importance to the development capacity of the RE market. The main reason is that in case of the possibility to improve the products in RE markets by making research and development, investment can lower their cost. Hence, the profitability of the RE investment can increase by examining the market in detail for this purpose. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.