Can China's industrial sector achieve energy conservation and emission reduction goals dominated by energy efficiency enhancement? A multi-objective optimization approach

Abstract

Whether China could meet its 2030 energy conservation and emission reduction goals depends on whether energy efficiency serves as the most important measure of carbon emission reduction. This study has explored how industrial sector could achieve the goals on the premise of maintaining certain economic growth from the perspective of energy efficiency enhancement. The industrial correlation model and multi-objective optimization model are combined to find out the path of energy efficiency improvement, with the decision variables being economic output and energy intensity of various sub-sectors. Through intelligent optimization algorithm, nine paths of energy efficiency improvement are obtained and the corresponding optimal path is found out. The results indicate that regardless of the expected high-speed or medium-speed economic growth, the optimized path could achieve the goal of carbon emission peak, mainly depends on energy efficiency improvement. In the scenario of high-speed economic growth, the amount of CO2 emission could be reduced by 58.31% through energy efficiency enhancement, and further reduced by 28.22% through industrial restructuring; while in the medium-speed growth scenario, the CO2 emission amount could be reduced by 57.88% employing improving energy efficiency, and further be reduced by 29.44% employing industrial restructuring.