Renewable energy sustainability evaluation framework

Renewable energy is a challenge for the future development of humanity. Considering the importance granted to this topic, lately, the paper aims to analyze, through a detailed statistical analysis, the intention of... [ view full abstract ]

Renewable energy is a challenge for the future development of humanity. Considering the importance granted to this topic, lately, the paper aims to analyze, through a detailed statistical analysis, the intention of constructing a framework to assess the sustainability of renewable energy and to assess strengths and points that require attention and improvement in each country. Measuring the sustainability of this economic sector is of particular relevance in order to proactively and effectively determines investment decisions.

In order to achieve our research goals, we conducted a complex statistical analysis based on a set of relevant computation procedures such as Factor Analysis - Principal Component Analysis (FA-PCA). We tested our framework on three former communist countries with different development level, in order to observe if there are different manners of the renewable energy development. The proposed framework can reveal the development stages of renewable energy sustainability for the analyzed countries and can provide solutions to increase the sustainability of a country. In the same time, ALSCAL analysis was used to determine the distances between chosen states, measured Euclidian, based on the selected indicators. This type of analysis helps to produce a proximal distance map, the coordinates of the map axes being referred to in SPSS as "stimulus coordinates".

This paper focuses on the evaluation of country sustainability from economic, social, environmental and institutional perspectives and determines which the country trends are for the development of the renewable energy sector in order to help decision-makers for long-term investment. Otherwise, distances between selected countries, in terms of renewable energy sustainability was calculated.