Sustainability Assessment of Electricity Supply Chain via Resource Waste Reduction and Pollution Emissions Management: A Case Study of the Power Industry

The energy and power industries are one of the most important economic sectors, essential in creating value-added economic growth in any society. The waste of energy resources and environmental issues in the energy and power plant sectors have created various challenges for the power industry. Managing existing capacities and reducing environmentally harmful effects result in system efficiency enhancement and wasted energy returns to the natural cycle in electricity supply chain divisions. This study aims to determine divisions of an electricity supply chain as resource allocation handling, providing harmful emissions abatement (e.g., carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases) and waste energy mitigation. The proposed intermediate approach measures the unified inefficiency score of each production factor and determines the level of total unified inefficiency from the average of the sum of these inefficiency scores. Indeed, the proposed intermediate approach distinguishes influential supply chain divisions from the uninfluential ones to sources utilization management for abatement of significant flare and greenhouse gases and wasted energy in energy and power plant sectors, as well as transmission and distribution lines. The current paper introduces intermediate approaches for sustainability evaluation of the electricity supply chain based on data envelopment analysis models. The proposed approach evaluates the potential of supply chain divisions to reduce undesirable outputs. The intermediate approach, under managerial disposability, enables us to determine regions of the supply chain with the necessary preparation to confront harmful emissions and wasted energy. One empirical implication has been obtained from model performance in the electricity supply chain. Findings suggested that the oil field, power plant, and transmission line divisions, as well as industrial consumers, have adequate potential for pollution emissions abatement and energy loss prevention as the increase of inputs provides more outputs. Moreover, these divisions are efficient in 10 supply chains. The implications of the results, including the fact that the increase of inputs provides desirable output increments and productivity enhancement in the oil field, power plant sections, and industrial consumers, have been considered.