Energy efficiency assessment in European Union countries and industries
A dissertation submitted to the School of Production Engineering and Management at the Technical University of Crete in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy ; Summarization: The aim of this thesis is the evaluation of energy efficiency in EU countries and industrial sectors over the period 2000-10 and 2000-09, respectively. In the first stage of analysis in which the energy efficiency in 26 EU countries is evaluated, we follow a two-stage approach based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Multicriteria Decision Aiding approach (MCDA). The proposed two-stage DEA/MCDA approach can be easily used for benchmarking purposes, allowing for the formulation of a complete ranking of all countries under consideration, as well as the monitoring of the performance of a country over time using data solely at the country level, without having to resort to relative assessments in comparison to data from a set of peer countries. The results of the empirical analysis indicate that despite the considerable improvements achieved in terms of energy intensity, a more refined view of energy consumption and economic activity data shows that there is still much to be done to improve the actual energy efficiency of European countries. Additionally, the economic crisis of the past few years has had negative effects on energy efficiency. Furthermore, it is has been found that for European countries, the effect due to the consideration of the structure of their economic activity is stronger than the effect due to the introduction of a breakdown by their energy mix. Next, we extend our research to evaluating the energy efficiency trends of ten energy-intensive industries in 23 EU countries. Specifically, the performance of the construction, electricity, mining and quarrying, transport, food and tobacco, textiles and leather, pulp and paper, coke and chemicals, other non-metallic mineral and fabricated metal, machinery and equipment is examined. In the first stage, the DEA combined with the ...