Assessing national energy sustainability using multiple criteria decision analysis

The development of sustainable energy systems is crucial to addressing the environmental, economical, and social pressures of the energy sector. Energy sustainability, as one of the most important factors powering modern economies, is a complex concept related to important technological, environment...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inInternational journal of sustainable development and world ecology Vol. 28; no. 1; pp. 18 - 35
Main Authors Phillis, Anastasia, Grigoroudis, Evangelos, Kouikoglou, Vassilis S.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Abingdon Taylor & Francis 02.01.2021
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Subjects
Alternative energy
Alternative energy sources
Barometers
Data smoothing
Decision analysis
Energy
Energy industry
Energy sustainability
Income
multiple criteria decision analysis
Multiple criterion
Parameter sensitivity
Performance evaluation
PROMETHEE method
Renewable energy
Sensitivity analysis
Sustainability
sustainability assessment
sustainability indicators
Sustainable development
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Summary:The development of sustainable energy systems is crucial to addressing the environmental, economical, and social pressures of the energy sector. Energy sustainability, as one of the most important factors powering modern economies, is a complex concept related to important technological, environmental, and socio-economic issues. This paper proposes a framework for defining and measuring the sustainability of national energy systems. It is based on several energy sustainability indicators that cover three major dimensions: environment, human system, and energy system. The proposed framework includes data smoothing, normalization and imputation, and application of the PROMETHEE method to evaluate the sustainability performance of 43 European countries. The results show that geographical and income groupings are strongly related to energy sustainability performance. In particular, high-income Scandinavian and Western European countries are highly ranked in terms of energy sustainability. A sensitivity analysis regarding the main parameters of the PROMETHEE method justifies the robustness of rankings, while a comparison with other barometers shows that the presented results are consistent with alternative energy sustainability approaches.
ISSN:1350-4509
1745-2627
DOI:10.1080/13504509.2020.1780646