China's path of carbon neutralization to develop green energy and improve energy efficiency

Abstract

In order to cope with global warming and as the world's largest carbon dioxide emitter, China has put forward the goal of carbon neutralization by 2060 and taken the development path choice of green energy to achieve it. China's green energy has developed rapidly from 2011 to 2019, but there are significant regional differences. Because existing research on the comparison of energy efficiency among regions rarely takes the development of green energy into account, this present study sets the proportion of green energy power generation in energy consumption as an exogenous variable and proposes a modified meta dynamic non-radial directional distance function to modify the energy efficiency values of 30 provinces in China. The empirical results show with the development advantages of green energy that the energy efficiency value of western China is revised upward from 0.45 to 0.64, and that the technology gap between the western and eastern regions has significantly narrowed. The development of green energy in the central region lags behind that in the western region at an energy efficiency value of 0.53. Finally, this study offers forward policy recommendations to realize the sustainable development of green energy among regions.