New approach for assessing and optimising the environmental performance of multinational electricity sectors: A European case study

•An adequate energy planning is a key issue for Europe.•All environmental impacts must be studied for the European electricity sector.•The model assesses the environmental performance of European power plants.•An environmental index was estimated for Europe and for each European country.•The environmental performance of the European electricity sector was optimised. The aim of energy planning is to achieve a reliable supply of energy resources at competitive costs and with the least negative impacts on society and the environment. However, most of the existing studies tend to ignore environmental impacts, although the electricity sector contributes greatly to environmental degradation. Therefore, the aim of this study is threefold: i) to assess the environmental performance of the most common types of renewable and non-renewable power plants in Europe, ii) to estimate an environmental index for each one of the electricity sectors in the European countries, and iii) to evaluate and optimise the environmental behaviour of the European electricity sector as a whole; in all cases taking into account fifteen environmental midpoint indicators with a cradle-to-grave approach. A combined procedure including a multi-criteria decision making model and an optimisation approach under three different scenarios was used for such a purpose. According to the results, hydro as well onshore and offshore wind resulted to be the best alternatives with environmental indices above 0.95 (being 1 the maximum possible value), while biogas and oil-fired power plants usually occupied the last positions of the ranking, with indices below 0.5. Some countries achieved outstanding environmental results such as Austria, Croatia, Ireland, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia or Sweden, with indices always above 0.85, while Bulgaria, Cyprus, Estonia or Poland obtained discouraging results, since their production is largely based on oil, lignite or hard coal. Europe should boost hydro, onshore and offshore wind and natural gas power plants in order to improve its current index of 0.7363.