Ranking of G-20 Countries According to Energy Production Sources in the Context of Sustainability by TOPSIS Method

The primary purpose of this study is to rank G20 member countries according to different types of energy production at the country level using Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) techniques. In this study, G20 countries are ranked according to their energy production using the TOPSIS method, one of the most widely used approaches in the MCDA literature. The alternatives are G20 members, and the criteria consist of electricity generation from fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, and coal), renewable energy, nuclear energy, and CO2 emissions. In the 2020-2022 period, G20 countries are evaluated under two scenarios according to different types of energy production. In the first scenario, where all criteria are equally weighted, the United States (USA), European Union (EU), and China ranked highest for each year in the years under evaluation, respectively. In the second scenario, which has an environmental perspective on the weighting of the criteria, similar to the first scenario, the EU and the USA are in the first two places, while France is the third country in the ranking. The most remarkable finding obtained within the scope of the study is that China and Saudi Arabia, which rank highly in the first scenario, are ranked last in the second scenario evaluated from an environmental perspective. Different from the studies in the literature, in this study, evaluations are made with an environmental view by assigning higher weights to the criteria of renewable energy production, nuclear energy production, and emission values.