Exploring influence factors governing the changes in China’s final energy consumption under a new framework

Abstract

In this paper, China’s final energy consumption has been divided into two parts: production energy consumption and resident energy consumption. Under this framework, the LMDI method is used to study the nature of the factors governing the changes in final energy consumption. Thus, seven factors are defined in this paper: energy mix effect, energy intensity effect, economic structure effect, economic growth effect, resident income effect, urbanization effect, and population effect. The production energy consumption almost accounted for 90 % of total final energy consumption in 2011. The annual growth rate of resident energy consumption increased to 8.7 % during 2001–2011. The gap in resident energy consumption per capita between urban and rural decreased during 1991–2011. Our results show that the energy intensity effect plays an important role in decreasing final energy consumption. However, the economic growth effect is found to be primarily responsible for driving final energy consumption growth over the study period, followed by resident income effect, population effect, economic structure effect, and urbanization effect. Though the urbanization rate increased rapidly over the period 1991–2011, the urbanization effect plays minor contribution to the increase in final energy consumption among all factors.