**1. Introduction**

"*Energy cannot be created or destroyed; it can only be changed from one form to another*." (Albert Einstein)

"*Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed.*" (Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier [1])

Energy has become one of the most strategic resources for countries to retain their sustainable development ability. Human beings require more and more electricity and heat to perform their daily activities, which leads to increased energy consumption. If the current trends continue, global energy demand will double by 2050 [1]. Polish policymakers face that demand-driven challenge and must also fulfill the climate goals, including becoming

**Citation:** Senkus, P.; Glabiszewski, W.; Wysoki ´nska-Senkus, A.; Cyfert, S.; Batko, R. The Potential of Ecological Distributed Energy Generation Systems, Situation, and Perspective for Poland. *Energies* **2021**, *14*, 7966. https://doi.org/10.3390/en14237966

Academic Editors: Bartlomiej Iglinski, Antonio Rosato and Michał Bernard Pietrzak

Received: 4 October 2021 Accepted: 23 November 2021 Published: 29 November 2021

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**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/).

"climate neutral" by 2050. Achieving this is even harder because coal-powered facilities have about eighty percent of electricity in Poland, and the country is under growing pressure from the EU to reduce emissions as soon as possible.

Luckily, science and practice show that a strong innovation wave is growing in the energy sector, resulting in a disruptive change in the efficiency of clean energy facilities and cutting the unit cost of energy production [2–7].

Some energy sector analytics, such as Lovins A., declare that achieving the energy transformation goal is possible. He said that "dependence on oil and coal could be eliminated by 2050 while switching to efficient use and renewable supply", implementing only existing technologies [3,7]. Other inventors and scientists such as McDonough W. and Braungart M. claim that it can be achieved even without reducing the quality of life. The authors have declared using clean and renewable energy as one of the fundamental issues of their "Cradle to cradle" concept: "Living things thrive on the energy of current solar income. Similarly, human constructs can utilize clean and renewable energy in many forms—such as solar, wind, geothermal, gravitational energy and other energy systems being developed today—thereby capitalizing on these abundant resources while supporting human and environmental health".

The article presents the research results on ecological distributed energy generation systems, making the transformation of the Polish energy sector possible.

The main objectives of the study included:


The following research questions were asked:


The novelty of this study is the use of the weighted SWOT analysis method to analyze the Polish energy sector and individual electricity production systems. When one enters the phrase "weighted SWOT" into the Google Scholar search engine, one only finds about 70 results, of which about 30% are associated with energy. "Google Scholar" returned more than one and a half million results after searching "SWOT". The application of the above analysis was the basis for achieving the research goals set by the authors. The following study applied a weighted SWOT to Poland, but it can also be used on a voivodeship, city, or commune scale.

This study may be of interest to politicians, local governmen<sup>t</sup> officials, managers of public, private, and non-profit organizations, and environmental activists, and engineers in the field of environmental protection. Genuine care for the planet, expressed, among other things, through the optimization of energy production processes, should be part of the typical activities of the stakeholders mentioned above and, just like ordinary people, should not be dominated by any field of science.

Another novelty of this study is showing the reader the so-called "big picture"; that is, a bird's-eye view, which allows people specializing in a vase in their fields to have a different look at the issues of energy production own business.
