Alternative indicators for the evaluation of renewables in Europe: An efficiency approach

Abstract

This paper studies and proposes a composite indicator for evaluating the employment of renewable sources of energy in some strategic sectors. Nowadays, the relevance of such an issue is not only theoretical but has also important practical implications. Actually, this is a crucial topic addressed by the European Commission in order to assign funds and to raise fares to the European countries that, respectively, complies or not with the task of transforming the traditional energy consumption into a one based on renewable energies. However, the currently used indicators are not based on a comparison among countries, assume the compensability among simple indicators and are not robust to outliers and abnormal values, therefore, do not reflect appropriately the effort done in pursuing the targets required. Here, an alternative approach, based on productive efficiency methods, is proposed in order to rank countries appropriately and at the same time to promote incentive strategies on how to combine in an optimal way the consumption of renewables according to the priorities that countries have in the involved sectors.