Energy industry Carbon neutrality transition path: Corpus-based AHP-DEMATEL system modelling

Abstract

Objective/Significance:“Carbon neutrality” has become a major focus of the development of green energy; for the energy industry, there is an urgent need to promote the realization of the goal of carbon neutrality through transition; this study aims to explore the path of energy industry carbon neutrality transition. This study has methodological innovations in the existing literature in the combination of qualitative and quantitative research on the carbon neutral transition of energy industry. The large-scale case corpus study bears an important significance for providing pragmatic typical case references for energy industry and enterprises involved. Method/Process:This study treats the energy industry as a system. Exemplified by China’s energy carbon neutrality, this study collects authoritative case data to establish a large-scale corpus concerning energy industry carbon neutral transition, followed by extracting word frequency through keyword search in the corpus for quantitative analysis, after that, qualitative analysis is carried out by Concordance function of the corpus. Based on the Corpus results, an AHP model has been built, applying DEMATEL method to implement further qualitative analysis, obtaining the factors that affect the carbon neutral transformation of the energy industry; both of the priority and influence of those factors are further calculated. Through the analysis of three sorts of typical cases, the actual validity and practical feasibility of the relationship derived from the Corpus keywords and concordance were further verified, and previously identified model was eventually tested through actual case analysis. Results/Conclusions:The research results show that amongst those five factors impacting the carbon neutralization , “Management” bears the closest relations with other factors (the maximum R+C value is 1.845); “Trading” exerts the greatest influence on other factors (the maximum R+C value is 0.823), thus “Trading” has the highest priority, followed by “Digitalization “(0.755) and “Innovation” (0.666). Both “Technology”(-1.331) and “Management” (-0.913)are of negative values, indicating that they are influence recipients. It is confirmed by those actual cases that carbon trading, innovation and digitalization function as effective means to achieve carbon neutrality for energy enterprises. Based on the results, this paper draws a conclusion: three preferred paths of neutralization can be taken into account by energy industry, namely, carbon trading, innovation and digitalization.