energies Article New Methodological Approach for Performance Assessment in the Bioenergy Field Claudiu Cicea * , Corina Marinescu and Nicolae Pintilie   Citation: Cicea, C.; Marinescu, C.; Pintilie, N. New Methodological Approach for Performance Assessment in the Bioenergy Field. Energies 2021, 14, 901. https:// doi.org/10.3390/en14040901 Academic Editor: Solange I. Mussatto Received: 31 December 2020 Accepted: 5 February 2021 Published: 9 February 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). Department of Management, Bucharest University of Economic Studies, 010374 Bucharest, Romania; corina.marinescu@man.ase.ro (C.M.); pintilienicolae15@stud.ase.ro (N.P.) * Correspondence: claudiu.cicea@man.ase.ro Abstract: Bioenergy, along with other renewables, has always played its part in the world’s energy transition. Tracking the progress to meet specific goals has long been tackled and led to perfor- mance evaluation in the field. The present study aims to contribute to this area with a performance assessment framework in the bioenergy field. It comprises 16 European countries and 30 indicators as- signed to three dimensions: innovation, efficiency, and sustainability and it follows a well-established methodology. For enabling country-to-country comparison, five maps are designed for better il- lustration. The country performance ranking is one of the main outputs of the analysis, revealing the outperformers and the weakest countries from its bottom half, as well as the particularities of countries scoring on each of the three dimensions. The policy recommendations and study limitations represent the most relevant part of the conclusions. Keywords: bioenergy; efficiency; innovation; performance; sustainability 1. Introduction Ever since society has called for a more sustainable life, renewable energy has been hailed as a reliable alternative to traditional energy and as a key to designing paths for achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement, for creating a circular economy and for playing its part in the energy revolution. The shift to renewables triggers a repositioning in terms of infrastructure (industrial and residential), technology, production processes, policies, and strategies. At the macroeconomic level, the idea of performance assessment refers to verifying the extent to which a country carries out its activities to meet targets set at the national, regional or global level. In the field of energy, the performance study involves finding dimensions that contribute to optimizing key elements, such as energy consumption from renewable sources, energy efficiency, less polluting transport, energy security, and infrastructure needed to support the transition to a new energy era. Developing a performance assessment framework in the bioenergy field is a challenge, a process which, once completed, can provide a tool with multiple uses. Such a tool is ca- pable of revealing a transparent view of the bioenergy field performance and of facilitating comparisons among countries. At the same time, it may offer relevant information on the current status of development in this field and keep track of changes in the performance level in time. The present paper is structured as follows: first, a conclusive review of the relevant literature is conducted, revealing contributions in the bioenergy field from an international perspective. Second, a well-developed methodological section explains the modelling assumptions for creating the performance assessment framework. The contributions made by this paper are discussed in the results section, while both policy implications and further research directions are provided in the conclusion. Energies 2021, 14, 901. https://doi.org/10.3390/en14040901 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/energies