A Framework for the Analysis of the Sustainability of the Energy Retail Market

This paper addresses the issue of assessing the sustainability of policy decisions of the Energy Retail Market, explicitly considering the retail energy market, unlike existing approaches in the literature that analyze the energy market as a whole. The sustainability assessment is treated as the process by which the sustainability implications of an initiative are assessed, where the initiative can be a proposed or existing policy, plan, program, project, piece of legislation, or current practice or activity. The paper provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the literature on the sustainability of policy decisions in the retail energy sector and formulates a conceptual framework for policy sustainability analysis in the retail energy sector. The systematic review is complemented by a quantitative bibliometric analysis on the 48 collected papers published from 1997 to 2022. The proposed framework allows for a balanced analysis of the sustainability of policy decisions by evaluating the technical, economic, and environmental impacts. It could be used to develop a list of indicators that can map the different impacts and their interactions. Critical analysis of the existing findings leads us to identify future research directions.