Poland, as a member of the European Union (EU), has to fulfill the obligations resulting from its membership in it. It is necessary to comply with numerous directives and other legal provisions adopted by the European Commission in the field of the energy market and production. Meeting the demands of the European Green Deal, as well as the solutions presented in the Fit for 55 package, is very difficult. In Poland, coal is still used in over 67% of electricity production. This article presents an attempt to join the multi-threaded discussion on renewable energy sources (RES) and the possibility of increasing their share in Poland’s energy mix. This article defines the RES support mechanisms in Poland, presents the support systems and instruments functioning within them, and also provides a statistical prediction of trends in energy production from RES for upcoming years. Research utilized the Brown, Holt, and Winters models and the cause-and-effect model. The research conducted in this article shows that Poland must make significant efforts to decarbonize the economy; in addition, the too quickly changing RES support system is not conducive to the development of these sources.

Sustainable development requires the intervention of public authorities in areas where market mechanisms do not guarantee the proper allocation of goods. Some of these goods include public services such as local collective transport and municipal waste management. In many countries, the process of remunicipalizing these service provisions is underway and, in the modern model used in providing these services, municipally owned corporations (MOCs) play a special role. The specific nature of these companies (i.e., the duality of their objectives and that they are required to run classic economic calculations while they are assessed in terms of the quality of their services) encouraged the authors to formulate the primary goal of the study, which was to assess the link between the financial and operational efficiency of MOCs and the quality of their services. The present study’s authors developed a method for measuring the financial and operational efficiency of MOCs. In addition, a set of standards for assessing the quality of public service provision were defined, and opinion surveys were carried out to evaluate them. Subsequently, multi-criteria rankings of the efficiency and quality of services of the MOCs tested were drawn up using a synthetic variable based on the zero unitarization method (ZUM). A correlation of the analyzed variables was examined (Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient) and simple line regression models were built. Our research showed that analyses of MOCs, when limited to their financial and operational aspects, are incomplete. According to the empirical analysis carried out, the financial and operational efficiency of MOCs does not translate to the quality of their services. Therefore, we believe that, in assessing the activities of MOCs, it is necessary to take into account criteria that measure the quality of meeting the needs of the local community in addition to financial criteria.

The aim of the article is to present the construction of a tool motivating local government units (LGUs) to introduce a policy of saving energy from traditional sources and replacing it with renewable energy sources. The bonus allocation algorithm was built using econometric modelling based on the results of a survey conducted among LGUs. The survey allows for data collection, enabling the creation of energy efficiency indicators, which play a key role in the construction of the LGU bonus mechanism. The strength of the proposed tool lies in its construction based on models calculating the bonuses granted to LGUs depending on, e.g. the reduction of the pollutant emission index, the RES investment expenditure index, or the reduction in the energy consumption rate. This is the first proposal of its kind for a tool improving the energy efficiency of LGUs in Poland that was developed using the scientific method.

Objectives: To seek for the optimum economic model for public utility services in the sector of municipal waste management; to present the results of studies regarding the efficiency of companies in the sector of management of municipal waste and the systems that such companies function within. Research Design & Methods: Multi-criterion rankings with the use of synthetic variable, the structure of which has been based on zeroed unitarisation (method of zeroed unitarisation – MZU). Owing to general financial data, technical and operational data, as well as output data, it was possible to determine rankings of effectiveness for companies in the system of municipal waste management and communes. What is more, a correlation diagram was created – the dependency between the aggregated effectiveness of companies and the aggregated effectiveness of waste management in communes. Findings: Communes which entrust municipal companies with management of an integrated system for municipal waste management or/and its individual chains feature more properties of operating, economic, and financial effectiveness within the scope of management of municipal waste. Implications / Recommendations: It is demonstrated that communes which entrust municipal companies with management of an integrated system for municipal waste management – or/and its individual chains – feature more properties of operating, economic, and financial effectiveness within the scope of the management of municipal waste. Contribution / Value Added: Further extended research into the organisation and management of the municipal waste management system. Article classification: The article presents an original and innovative analysis of the municipal waste management sector with the use of the developed research method of aggregation and unit efficiency ranking. The purpose is to continue the extended research on the organisation and management of the municipal waste management system.

The main objective of this article is to determine the effectiveness of enterprises providing municipal services and a model approach for processes related to the provision of local public transport services in Poland. In particular, the identification included methods of organisation and implementation of public utility tasks as well as organisational and legal forms and forms of ownership in the case of local collective transport. An attempt has been made to determine the effectiveness of enterprises providing urban transport services in cities in Poland, assessing their operational, financial, technical and social effectiveness. The research design and methods used in this article are based on the assessment of the effectiveness of enterprises using taxonomic methods of grouping e ntities according to selected characteristics and efficiency measures. The use of the k-means method with the number of clusters determined on the basis of the hierarchical Ward method, in which the contribution of variables to the differentiation of clusters was determined on the basis of a one-way analysis of ANOVA variance, to obtain groups of companies with similar efficiency indicators. The findings, based on the conducted research, present the relationship between the economic efficiency of public transport companies and their organisational and legal form as well as the type of ownership. Recommendations from empirical studies indicate that public enterprises operating in the field of municipal services provide public utility services with a higher level of economic efficiency than other distinctive groups of carriers. The added value is that the research methods presented in this work can be successfully applied to other sectors of the economy and other countries in order to verify the effectiveness of individual organizational, legal and ownership forms of enterprises. JEL classification: L300