Comparison of Power Plants Efficiency among 73 Countries

Abstract

Effective and efficient production of electricity is promised to be one of the critical factors to utilize energy for sustainable development. We employ data envelopment analysis (DEA), including undesirable CO2 emissions outputs, to evaluate power plants resource utilization efficiency within 73 countries in order to incorporate the global warming effect. We find that Asia enjoys the highest technical efficiency and European countries suffer from the lowest technical efficiency among Europe, Asia, and America continents. Besides, we compare models with and without CO2 emissions and find that they have significant differences among technical and pure technical efficiencies. We also set up three hypotheses to examine gross national product (GNP), urbanization, and electricity import level factors that potentially influence power plants efficiency by Tobit regression analysis. Results show that GNP and urbanization have significant effects on power plants efficiency except electricity import level.