The green behavioral effect of clean coal technology on China's power generation industry

Abstract

Clean coal technology is a green technology and it can improve the efficiency of thermal coal usage and helps to speed up the green development of the power generation industry. To better understand the actual effect of clean coal generating technology on CO2 emission reduction, we take the ultra-supercritical power generation technology as an example to illustrate the positive impact on the environment. Since support vector machine has widely been used in the field of time series prediction due to its advantages compared with other prediction models, in this paper we will use support vector machine to build a prediction model and estimate the electricity demand from 2020 to 2040 in China. Then, based on the future electricity demand with ultra-supercritical power generation technology, we calculate the amount of carbon emission reduction which uses the carbon emission calculation method of UNFCCC. Our results show that: 1. The coal-fired electricity demand will reach 5070.1 billion kWh in 2020. 2. The amount of carbon emissions reduction due to the application of ultra-supercritical power generation technology in coal-fired electricity will be 0.233 billion tons. 3. Carbon emissions will only reduce by 2.1%–3.0%, which means that traditional clean coal generation technology can only decrease CO2 emissions to a certain extent, and the achievement of larger reductions may have to rely on carbon capture and storage and renewable energy.