Analyzing the Efficiencies of Renewable Energy Sources with Data Envelopment Analysis

In this paper, we compare the efficiencies of the eight major renewable energy sources that generate electricity. We use Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to determine the most efficient renewable energy source. We apply four different analytical approaches to rank these energy sources with respect to their efficiency scores. According to our DEA analysis, biomass and geothermal are the most efficient and solar technologies (photovoltaics technologies and solar thermal) are the least efficient renewable energy sources. We also find out land requirement is very important input to determine the efficiency scores of these technologies