Abstract
Climate change and awareness of the need to care for the environment have resulted in a global increase in the interest in renewable energy sources. The European Union (EU) is active in this respect and requires Member States to fulfill specific plans in the transformation of their energy systems. We employed hierarchical cluster analysis in an attempt to distinguish those countries among the new EU Member States that increased their electrical capacity from renewable energy sources to the greatest extent while paying attention to their energy intensity. The analyses were conducted in two scenarios for both 2004 and 2016. The first scenario assumed an analysis of all known renewable energy sources, whereas in the second scenario, only renewable energy sources from wind and solar power plants were included. The division of analyses into these two variants showed the importance of the differences in the energy assessment of individual countries, depending on classification of renewable energy sources. We identified groups of countries where electrical capacity from renewable energy sources increased the most. Conducting analyses using two variants allowed distinguishing countries that based most of their renewable energy on modern renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power plants. The inclusion of gross domestic product in the analyses allowed us to identify countries with the worst energy efficiency value.
Highlights
Electricity is the basis for the functioning of the modern world, but its acquisition is often not environmentally friendly
The variable designations introduced above were which is the sum of the capacity of all types of electricity sources; ECR is the Electrical Capacity determined for the relevant year: EC2004, ECR2004, ECRN2004, GDP2004, EC2016, ECR2016, Renewable, which is the total capacity of the renewable energy sources by the most commonly used
Reason, the analyses for 2004 and 2016 were reconstructed for a comparison with the assumption that only wind and solar power plants are renewable energy sources. These analyses showed the extent to which the new type of renewable energy sources affect the classification of countries and the ratio of electrical capacity only from this type of energy in relation to gross domestic product (GDP)
Summary
Electricity is the basis for the functioning of the modern world, but its acquisition is often not environmentally friendly. Apart from the most obvious, such as the level of economic development and the volume of energy production, there are important geographical determinants [23,24] or social acceptance factors of renewable energy prices must be considered [25,26,27]. Both options the for impact of the hydroelectric power stations dozens of years ago,toonly wind and the classification of renewable energy sourcesbuilt wereseveral analyzed for 2004 and 2016 determine the solar level power plants as renewable sources Both options foranalysis the classification of renewable of change. Enabled enabled an an assessment assessment of of the the energy energy efficiency from these renewable energy sources
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