Site selection plays an important role in the entire life cycle of solar thermal power plant (STPP) and the multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods are very important in the whole STEP site selection process. Some problems in the present MCDM methods decrease the evaluation quality of STPP site selection: first, the qualitative information cannot be processed reasonably in the evaluation of the STPP site; second, it is difficult to satisfy the independent assumption of the multi-criteria decision making methods used in STPP site evaluation in fact. So this paper proposes a decision framework for evaluating and selecting optimal site for STPP. The framework involves three stages. First, potential feasible sites are identified based on energy, infrastructure, land, environmental, and social factors; second, the fuzzy measure is used to weight the important degrees of criteria to avoid the independent assumption; third, the linguistic variable instead of fuzzy set theory or numerical value reflects the experts' intuitive preferences; fourth, a group decision making method with linguistic Choquet integral (LCI) is used to rank the alternative sites. Finally, a Chinese case study demonstrates the effectiveness of decision framework proposed in this paper. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.