Tools for Measuring Energy Sustainability: A Comparative Review

Abstract

This paper is intended to perform a comparative and qualitative review among eight tools to measure energy sustainability. Therefore, it was necessary to create a theoretical and conceptual framework based on four criterias of selection and six categories of comparison. In this work, the conceptual bases that supported the research and the methodology created to carry out the comparative review will be presented. This analysis was based on the intrinsic concepts of energy sustainability of each of the reviewed tools with a critical qualitative analysis. Some conclusions shown through the conceptual framework developed that it was possible to apply an innovative methodology to qualitatively compare different tools to measure sustainability. The importance of this reflects the difficulty of conceptualizing the subjectivity of sustainable development, as shown throughout the paper, where it is often not possible to obtain a measurable result since the measured phenomenon is too complex to reduce it to a numerical value.