Advancement of European Union Countries in Sustainable Development Goal 7

ABSTRACT The United Nations 2030 Agenda identifies 17 Sustainable Development Goals, along with Goal 7 on ‘ensuring access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all’. Achieving it is a major challenge for countries, including the European Union member states. Hence, the aim of the article is to assess the level of SDG7 by 27 EU countries in 2014–2023, using the linear technique for ordering preferences by similarity to an ideal solution. In the study, we used data sourced from Eurostat. The research resulted in the creation of a synthetic measure of SDG7 in EU countries from 2014 to 2023. On this basis, we proposed rankings of countries in the examined period as well as their classifications into groups with similar characteristics for the years 2014 and 2023. The leaders in SDG7 were Denmark, Sweden, and Latvia, which were characterised by high energy productivity, high share of renewable energy in final energy consumption, and low dependence on energy imports. The lowest in the ranking were Luxembourg, Belgium, and Cyprus, mostly due to high primary energy consumption, low share of renewable energy in final energy consumption, and high dependence on energy imports. In the analysed period, improvements in the level of SDG7 were observed in most countries (from 0.494 in 2014 to 0.533 in 2023 on average) and while the diversity between countries decreased (from 0.053 in 2014 to 0.049 in 2023).