(620a) Assessment of the EU Member Countries Electricity Mix Using DEA and Effmixf

The assessment of the electricity mixes sustainability level is a crucial step in the change towards a more sustainable energy process. Here we assess the three dimensions of sustainability: the economic (i.e., the levelized cost of electricity), environmental (considering six impact indicators) and social performance (i.e., the number of direct job-yr) of the electricity mix of 28 EU members in 2015 by combining life cycle assessment, data envelopment analysis (DEA) and mathematical programming tools. Our method encompasses three main steps: i) the DEA application to the electricity portfolios of the 28 EU countries ii) the optimization of inefficient countries portfolio solving the EffMixF optimization problem that we pose in this work, iii) the evaluation of the optimized electricity portfolios obtained in STEP 2. The EffMixF model proposed takes into account the main technical constraints modeling electricity generation within each country which complements 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 lower efficiency. In our main findings, we determined that the non-renewable electricity sources have to be reduced a 10% (with respect the total electricity production) in order to become efficient. On the other hand, hydropower and wind electricity technologies are the sources to be enhanced to improve the environment performance, whereas solar and coal are (respectively) the preferred ones to improve the social and economic sustainability dimensions.