A Predictive Analysis of Clean Energy Consumption, Economic Growth and Environmental Regulation in China Using an Optimized Grey Dynamic Model

Abstract

To accurately predict the consumption of clean energy in China, a grey dynamic model is constructed by taking economic growth and environmental regulation as exogenous variables. The Nash equilibrium idea-based optimization method is proposed to solve the parameters of the model so as to obtain better modeling effects than that of the traditional model. The empirical results show that: (1) a spontaneous increasing mechanism of the clean energy consumption has not yet formed in China; (2) both GDP and effluent charge play a positive role in accelerating clean energy consumption in China, but effluent charge has a stronger effect than GDP; (3) clean energy consumption in China is expected to stably increase at an annual rate of 5.73 % averagely in 2012---2020. By 2020, clean energy consumption in China is expected to reach 454.55 million tons of standard coal. The study also provides some policy suggestions of promoting clean energy consumption based on the empirical analysis conclusions.