Abstract
The development of low-carbon electric power industry plays a vital role in sustainable economic development due to the supporting role of electricity in the Gross Domestic Product GDP. The electric carbon productivity indicator is introduced to investigate the provincial economic development and electric industry-related indicators. The refined Laspeyres decomposition technique is adopted to decompose provincial economic change into the quantitative influence of CO2 emission, electric carbon productivity, and emission structure for the first-stage decomposition; the electric carbon productivity change is sub-decomposed into the influence of factors such as electricity-economic productivity, electricity import-export, and generation carbon efficiency. Through decomposition analysis for the research period of 2005 to 2015, scientific and reasonable suggestions are made for improvement of electric carbon productivity and provincial economic development: (1) The main obstacle to electric carbon productivity improvement is emissions from the power industry. (2) There is interaction between the green economic development mode and the low-carbon electric power industry. In others words, provincial future economy development mode formulation should consider not only economic and industrial factors but also power industry factors. (3) The issue of electric carbon productivity improvement and regional development mode is partially consistent with geographic locations, which is a comprehensive effect of economy level, power industry, energy resources, technological development level, environmental awareness, etc. (4) Due to the existence of regional protection, provincial local incentives should be promulgated to break the GDP-driven development mode to realize coordination among the economy, power industry, and the environment.
Highlights
It is reported that carbon dioxide (CO2 ), accounting for more than 80% of the total greenhouse gases (GHG) globally, comes primarily from the burning of fossil fuels [1,2]
First-Stage Decomposition Results and Analysis. It shows that the average values of the relative contribution for the three factors (CO2 emission, electric carbon productivity, and emission structure), written as αi, β i and χi, are 60.091%, 47.201%, and −7.375%, respectively
The results show that the most important driving force of economic output is still the CO2 emissions from power plants generation
Summary
It is reported that carbon dioxide (CO2 ), accounting for more than 80% of the total greenhouse gases (GHG) globally, comes primarily from the burning of fossil fuels [1,2]. CO2 emissions at the combustion point of power generation make up the bulk of total emissions. About 37% of global electricity is generated by coal-based plants; and in China, this percentage was even higher at about 70% in 2015 [3,4]. Product GDP increase is regarded as a key assessment indicator for economic development; more energy, especially electricity, is consumed to pursue an economic increase, ignoring environmental issues. The more electricity is generated by fossil-fueled power plants to support economic development, the more corresponding CO2 emissions from fuel combustion will be
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