Clean and dirty energy cultures in the European Union

Abstract

The object of analysis in the text are “energy cultures” in the member states of the European Union (EU-28). The text attempts to verify the legitimacy of the statements pointing to the possibility of grouping the European Union member states according to a special kind of energy use practices. In order to elaborate the research problem the text features the following research questions: (1) Is it legitimate to claim that within the EU-28 there are special “energy cultures”?, (2) If the claim of the existence of special “energy cultures” is legitimate, what features determine the division among the EU-28 countries? These questions should be associated with the intention to establish the existence of the division of the EU-28 states into “clean” and “dirty” energy cultures. Such a division can be substantiated by individual features of the EU-28 member states, related to energy production, consumption and conversion, e.g. GHG emissions and the commitment to the coal sector. For the adopted premises to be verified, the analysis employed one of the agglomerative methods (i.e. the Ward’s method) and one of the methods for optimising a given group of objects (i.e. the k-means method). Besides, with the aid of individual tests, the differences in the level of parameters between the isolated clusters of countries were analysed. Furthermore, with the aid of the principal component method groups of independent factors were isolated, and the scope of essential differences in the level of the isolated factors between the grouped EU-28 member states was determined.