Reconciling energy and carbon emission performance for sustainability

The concepts of energy and environmental efficiency, with creating less or no pollution in production processes, help to redefine efficiency in general and serve to attain a sustainable future. The relevant literature is underprovided in analyzing environmental efficiency and thus performance measures for countries over time. This study models energy and CO2 emission performance in electricity generation from the production efficiency point of view. It uses a non-radial directional distance function and constructs energy, environmental and energy-environmental performance indices for 112 countries over the period of 1988-2011. The models are run in GAMS 23.5 with IEA data 2013. The countries are grouped firstly with respect to their use of combined heat and power (CHP) technology to construct best practice frontier. The second group is G20 countries, which allows investigation of the tradeoffs amongst energy and environmental performances of top 20 countries in the world. The last group is UNFCCC Annex I countries, consisting of Turkey. The study shows that the majority of the countries still have room for improvement for energy and the environment. For the most current year in the dataset, 2011, for all the indices, the following countries are the best performers; Switzerland and Sweden in the group of countries with CHP technology, Brazil for the non-CHP countries, Brazil and United Kingdom among G20 countries, and Belarus and Slovak Republic in Annex I. Consistent with the literature, Turkey has better energy and environmental performance compared to the major polluters as it performs around the medians of sample countries in UNFCCC Annex I. Keywords: Energy efficiency, Environmental efficiency, CO2 emission performance, Electricity Generation, Directional distance function, Data envelopment analysis.