Inserting socio-environmental variables in the power sector expansion planning

Energy models consider technical and economic criteria to define the optimal energy mix to produce electricity. However, the results are sub-optimal from the social point of view, since they do not include socio-environmental factors. The purpose of this study is to access the sustainability of power plants considering technical-economic, socio-environmental and institutional aspects so that to improve the expansion planning. Thus, the efficiencies calculated by slacks based measure approach of Data Envelopment Analysis methodology can be implemented as constraints in the models, signalizing that the socio-environmental impact cannot exceed a limit, which can be calculated by the energy model itself. The results show that renewable power plants contribute more to allocative efficiency than fossil fuel ones, both in terms of social and environmental aspects, which are of utmost importance in ranking power plants to model power capacity expansion. Considering just technical and economic factors has proved to be insufficient to optimize the system in terms of allocative efficiency.