Position of Hungary on EU’sMap of Renewable Energy Sources

The complex and decentralised use of renewable energy sources is one of the key issues in the European Union. The main objective is to develop a safe, diversified and environment-friendly energy structure in all member states, in which process agricultural production may play an important role. Although it seems that the energy demand of agricultural production is not intended to be selfsupporting in the close future, the cooperation of the different agricultural sectors and activities is essential to meet these targets. In our research, we examined the evolution of different macroeconomic factors in context of renewable energy sources; namely, how they are in accordance with the proposed objectives that must be fulfilled by 2010. The main goal of the research was to determine the key areas of the use of renewable energy sources and to explore their driving forces in the EU member states. By the evaluation of statistical data, we analyzed how the macroeconomic factors could influence the targeted objectives. According to our assumptions, the use of biomass energy is connected to not only agricultural production, but also other macroeconomic factors and production outputs. At the first step of the research, the selected macroeconomic factors were grouped by factor analysis. Based on the result of a cluster analysis by different factors, we could determine Hungary’s position compared to the other member states. We differentiated the groups and the group characters of Hungary and our competitors, by which the real competitors could be defined. The practical methods we collected can be adapted in the further development process of the Hungarian renewable energy sector.