Abstract
Abstract The assessment of the sustainability level achieved by electricity mixes is a crucial step in the change towards a more sustainable energy system. Here we assess the three dimensions of sustainability -the economic, environmental and social performance- of the 28 EU members electricity mix in 2015 by combining life cycle assessment, data envelopment analysis (DEA) and mathematical programming tools. Our method encompasses three main steps: i) the efficiency assessment of the electricity portfolios of the 28 EU countries via DEA ii) the optimization of inefficient countries portfolios by means of solving the EffMixF model that we pose in this work, and iii) the efficiency evaluation of the optimized electricity portfolios obtained in STEP 2. The EffMixF model takes into account the main technical constraints involved in electricity generation within each country, complementing standard DEA in order to extend previous research and obtain more realistic information for policy-making. We find that 12 countries are inefficient, being United Kingdom, Lithuania and Italy the ones with the lowest efficiency. In our main findings, we determine that inefficient countries have to reduce the non-renewable electricity sources by 10% (with respect the total electricity production) in order to become efficient.
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