Assessing national energy sustainability using multiple criteria decision analysis

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Energy sustainability
• sustainability assessment
• sustainability indicators
• PROMETHEE method
• multiple criteria decision analysis