Assessment of energy efficiency and its determinants for drinking water treatment plants using a double-bootstrap approach

Abstract

To achieve energy and climate goals, the energy performance of current and future drinking water treatment plants (DWTPs) must be improved. A few studies have evaluated the energy efficiency of these facilities using data envelopment analysis (DEA), however, they have ignored the deterministic nature of the DEA method. To overcome this limitation, a double-bootstrap DEA approach was used in this study to estimate the energy efficiency of DWTPs. For a sample of Chilean DWTPs, bias-corrected energy efficiency scores were computed with consideration of data variability, and the determinants of DWTP energy efficiency were explored. Most DWTPs in the sample had much room for the improvement of energy efficiency. In the second stage of analysis, facility age, the volume of water treated, and the technology used for treatment were found to influence DWTP energy efficiency. These findings demonstrate the importance of using a reliable and robust method to evaluate the energy efficiency of DWTPs, which is essential to support decision making and to benchmark these facilities’ energy performance.