Low-carbon development of urban power grids in China: Quality assessment, obstacle analysis, and potential release

Abstract

Urban power grid planning plays a pivotal role in the process of reducing carbon dioxide emissions from power grids. Traditional grey target models and analytic hierarchy processes fail to reflect the diversity of resource endowments in urban areas and cannot provide targeted solutions for carbon reduction strategies in urban power grids, representing a critical issue that urgently needs addressing. This paper introduces an enhanced grey target model based on the ‘source-grid-load’ system, establishes a quality evaluation index system for low-carbon development, and employs the Analytic Hierarchy Process - entropy weight method to account for the differentiated impacts of urban power grid partition resources. It conducts a comprehensive assessment of overall potential through multi-dimensional relative target centrality and identifies and examines key factors in low-carbon development potential using single-dimensional relative target centrality. The findings indicate that the refined grey target model, focusing on relative target centrality, effectively identifies areas with significant low-carbon development opportunities and assesses their developmental scope across various metrics, thereby providing strategic insights for carbon reduction planning in urban power grids under multi-objective decision-making conditions. This method will decrease CO2 emission by 21.38 % in 2030.