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Technological innovation is the key to develop wind power and photovoltaic power industries. The feed-in tariff (FIT) policy, as a demand-pull policy, is important to support renewable energy technological innovation. Using the "difference-in-differences" method, this paper investigates the impact of FIT policy of wind power and the impact of the FIT policy designed according to differences in the distribution of resources on wind power technological innovation. The findings show that the FIT policy can drive patenting in wind power technologies during the implementation period, but may play a relatively weak promoting role in technological innovation in the latter term, and the FIT policy designed according to differences in the distribution of resources also stimulates more patent counts. Finally, based on the fixed effect negative binomial regression model, this paper finds that the higher feed-in tariffs can increase the patent counts in photovoltaic power technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spite of ambitious investments by the Chinese government in renewable energy sources, the country's investment in coal power accelerated in recent years, raising concerns of massive overcapacity and undermining the central policy goal of promoting cleaner energy. In this paper, we ask why this happened, focusing on policies that incentivized excessive entry in the coal power sector and using a simple economic model to illustrate the policies' effects. Using coal-power project approval records from 2013 to 2016, we find the approval rate of coal power was about 3 times higher after approval authority was decentralized, with larger effects in regions producing more coal. We estimate that local coal production accounts for an additional 54GW of approved coal power in 2015 (other things equal), which is about 1/4 of total approved capacity in that year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]