Comparison of Power Plants Efficiency among 73 Countries

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. 1. Introduction This study examines the resource utilization efficiency of 73 countries’ power plant electricity generation efficiency to determine whether low efficiency countries can learn from other high efficiency countries since previous studies have focused primarily on efficiency and ignored CO2 emissions. Because few studies have discussed international power plant resource utilization efficiency, we want to know and compare the power plant resource utilization efficiency of numerous nations. Data for each country’s electricity generation were obtained to examine the efficiency of each country before comparing the differences between countries and to determine an approach for improving efficiency. This study includes CO2 emissions in output and uses a BCG matrix to analyze the reasons that countries have low or high efficiencies. Additionally, we consider the factors that may influence efficiency, such as GDP, GNP, continent location, urbanization, and electricity import level. Electricity is essential to people’s livelihood and is critical for every country’s developmental activities [1]. Liu et al. [2] considered electricity to become indispensable to the daily life of people for a long time. The increasing demand of developing industries has resulted in the need for more electricity. Therefore, when a country experiences an electricity shortage, its people and its economy are affected. Lam and Shiu [3] discussed the challenges confronted by power plants as more severe than those of other enterprises because energy sources have continually decreased