A Multi-Criteria Assessment of Renewable Energy Transitions: An Integrated MCDM Benchmarking Approach

The global energy system is undergoing a structural transformation as countries pursue decarbonization while safeguarding energy security and economic resilience. However, renewable energy transition performance remains difficult to assess because existing evidence is often fragmented across single indicators, capacity-based measures, or isolated policy dimensions, while transition outcomes are shaped by multiple environmental, economic, institutional, technological, and cost-related factors. This study addresses this gap by benchmarking renewable energy transition performance across G7 economies through an integrated multi-criteria decision-making framework. The proposed methodology combines distance-based CRITIC (D-CRITIC) for objective criteria weighting and COBRA for compromise-based ranking to translate heterogeneous transition indicators into transparent cross-country comparisons. Using a secondary dataset covering fourteen indicators and seven G7 economies, the framework first derives objective criterion weights from cross-country dispersion and distance-based inter-criteria dependence, and then ranks countries by measuring their compromise distances from positive ideal, negative ideal, and average solutions. Using fourteen indicators spanning renewable energy penetration, environmental pressure, economic conditions, governance capacity, technology cost feasibility, and innovation capability, the D-CRITIC results identify CO2 emissions per capita as the most informative criterion, followed by the share of electricity generated by bioenergy, the share of primary energy consumption from renewable sources, and solar LCOE. The COBRA-based assessment ranks Canada first, followed by the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany, Japan, the United States, and France. Robustness and sensitivity analyses show broad consistency in ranking patterns across alternative MCDM methods, while weight perturbation tests confirm that the ranking remains unchanged under ±5% and ±10% relative changes in criterion weights. These findings indicate that stronger renewable energy transition performance is associated with balanced progress across emissions reduction, renewable energy penetration, technology cost feasibility, institutional capacity, and innovation-related conditions, rather than superiority in a single indicator. The proposed framework offers a transparent and replicable tool for renewable energy transition benchmarking and evidence-based policy learning, while the results should be interpreted as cross-sectional comparative performance under the selected dataset and criteria rather than as a causal evaluation of specific policy instruments.