Measuring economic sustainability of energy use: an ANP-based evaluation of some European Union countries and Turkey

Abstract

This paper presents a new methodology for evaluating the economic sustainability of countries energy systems. The aim of the work is to improve the support tools for policy makers as the scale and complexity of the global energy industry demands a country-by-country approach to managing change. The proposed participatory analytic network process model was applied to the five largest energy consumers in the European Union, namely France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK plus Turkey a candidate for the European Union. The criteria used for the evaluations were selected from the economic dimension of the energy indicators for sustainable development. Results show that the best performer country is the UK followed by France, Turkey, Germany, Spain and Italy. Finally, we want to highlight that the methodology is able to grant participated decisions through a multi-expert traceable and transparent assessment process.