Regional energy security performance evaluation in China using MTGS and SPA-TOPSIS

As the world's largest energy production and demand country, China's energy security is a hot issue concerned by the whole society. Most existing research focused on China's energy security performance from the point of view of the country. But, as a huge geographical country, provinces energy security performance varies hugely in different regions. So, this paper aims at evaluating Chinese provinces energy security, analyzing reasons and providing policy implications. Firstly, a comprehensive evaluation criteria system, including four dimensions: energy supply, energy using, energy economy and energy environment, is proposed. The criteria consist of 14 indicators. Secondly, Mahalanobis-Taguchi Gram-Schmidt is presented to obtain criteria weights, which not only considers subjective and objective information, but also eliminates the overlap information in criteria. Thirdly, considering that TOPSIS method ignores the correlation between the two distances (alternatives to ideal and to negative ideal), an improved TOPSIS model with set pair analysis is proposed to assess the China's regional energy security performance from 2013 to 2017. From the results, 30 provinces' energy security performance improves in general, but there is still a huge gap among different regions. The north reaches of yellow river and northwest regions are the most energy-secure, while the northeast and central regions are least energy-secure. SHAANXI, INNERMONGOLIA and SHANXI are always top three in the ranking, while the energy security performance of NINGXIA is the lowest.