Measuring environmental efficiency of thermoelectric power plants: a common equilibrium efficient frontier DEA approach with fixed-sum undesirable output

Jie Wu, Panpan Xia, Qingyuan Zhu () and Junfei Chu
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Jie Wu: University of Science and Technology of China
Panpan Xia: University of Science and Technology of China
Qingyuan Zhu: University of Science and Technology of China
Junfei Chu: University of Science and Technology of China

Annals of Operations Research, 2019, vol. 275, issue 2, No 21, 749 pages

Abstract: Abstract China’s rapid development in economy has intensified many problems. One of the most important issues is the problem of environmental pollution. In this paper, a new DEA approach is proposed to measure the environmental efficiency of thermoelectric power plants, considering undesirable outputs. First, we assume that the total amount of undesirable outputs of any particular type is limited and fixed to current levels. In contrast to previous studies, this study requires fixed-sum undesirable outputs. In addition, the common equilibrium efficient frontier is constructed by using different input/output multipliers (or weights) for each different decision making unit (DMU), while previous approaches which considered fixed-sum outputs assumed a common input/output multiplier for all DMUs. The proposed method is applied to measure the environmental efficiencies of 30 thermoelectric power plants in mainland China. Our empirical study shows that half of the plants perform well in terms of environmental efficiency.

Keywords: Data envelopment analysis; Environmental efficiency; Equilibrium efficient frontier; Fixed-sum undesirable output (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10479-018-2958-0

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