Energy Sustainability: A Cross-country Empirical Investigation

Since the last decade, the energy industry is facing a major turning point, exploring new achievable solutions to the increasing global energy consumption. Given the importance of the energy supply in our society, I developed the Energy Sustainability Index (ESI) for the energy mix of 88 countries, whose goal is to determine the most efficient management of energy resources today and to evaluate a projection in the year 2030. The building of the ESI is divided into three macro categories:fossil fuels, nuclear power and renewable energies. On average, in 2009 the most sustainable countries are the least developed ones, then the developing economies and, finally, the developed nations. On the other hand, in 2030 the most sustainable countries remain averagely the least developed ones, while developing and developed economies switch positions. The main reason of this change is an increasing conversion of the developed nations’ energy mix towards nuclear and renewable energies. The general insights of this analysis are (ⅰ) low energy consumption helps the sustainability of a nation; (ⅱ) the employment of renewable energies improves significantly the country’s sustainability; (ⅲ) nations with large indigenous reserves of fossil fuels are more sustainable, but this advantage is not feasible in the long term. Finally, I analyze in details the current and future situations of seven nations whose energy consumption influences considerably the global energy sustainability:Japan, United States of America, European Union, Brazil, China, India and Russia.