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Home / Journals / ENERGY / Online First / doi:10.32604/ee.2026.088348
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ARTICLE

Responsible Energy Use—An EU Assessment

Alexandra Ciucu1,2,*, Cristina Georgiana Zeldea1
1 Institute for Economic Forecasting, Romanian Academy, Bucharest, Romania
2 Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Bucharest, Romania
* Corresponding Author: Alexandra Ciucu. Email: email
(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Science, Engineering, and Policy Innovations Driving the Global Energy Transition)

Energy Engineering https://doi.org/10.32604/ee.2026.088348

Received 02 July 2026; Accepted 18 August 2026; Published online 31 August 2026

Abstract

Pollution is among the main challenges facing humanity, which is why this concept is reflected in several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The present research aims to identify how similar EU member states are in terms of a set of variables intended to capture energy responsibility. To this end, indicators were selected from the Eurostat database referring to the share of energy from renewable sources, new zero-emission vehicles, air emissions accounts, environmental tax revenues, and the share of fuels in final energy consumption. To achieve the objective of the research, an unsupervised clustering method, namely the K-means algorithm, was applied to the 27 EU member states for the period 2015–2024. Accordingly, the analysis began with a factor analysis, through which a comprehensive factor score matrix was created and subsequently used as the basis for the cluster analysis. Among the results obtained, the formation of three clusters was observed, while significant differences between groups were identified for several indicators. Moreover, the robustness of the clustering solution was confirmed through variance decomposition, with between-cluster variance being considerably higher than within-cluster variance.

Keywords

Renewable energy; zero-emission vehicles; panel data; cluster analysis

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