Search

China has pledged to peak its carbon emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060. New energy decarbonization will be a major focus area for achieving the 'dual carbon' goals since it accounts for about 20 percent of China' s total energy consumption. The Xiong' an New Area' s geographical advantages and natural endowments have brought abundant wind and solar energy resources and have huge development potential in the field of new energy development. This paper summarizes the Xiong' an New Area' s resource endowment and achievements in developing new energy, and comprehensively analyzes the opportunities and challenges faced by this area in the process of building a national new energy demonstration zone in the context of achieving the 'dual carbon' goals. It sorts out the new energy development policy of the Xiong' an New Area and its history of new energy development and then points out that the current development of new energy in this area lies in power project construction, power grid construction, green energy consumption, energy storage development, and new energy equipment. This study believes that the Xiong' an New Area will experience three development stages of carbon neutrality: initial carbon neutrality, fluctuating carbon neutrality, and stable carbon neutrality, because this area has carried out green power planning simultaneously in the initial construction stage and has more green power supply. With the expansion of population and economic scale, the rapid increase in energy demand would lead to the decline in green power supply ratio, causing carbon neutrality to fluctuate and change over time. With the population and economic structure in a stable development stage, the proportion of high-value-added and high-tech industries would increase, and energy utilization technologies such as green electricity would make progress, resulting in the arrival of the stable carbon neutrality development stage. On the other hand, from the perspective of carbon sink potential corresponding to carbon sources, the planned proportion of the blue-green space and the construction land in the Xiong' an New Area would keep its carbon sink capacity in a relatively stable state for a long period of time. Therefore, in addition to the value-added of the natural carbon sink system, carbon capture, utilization and storage technologies and other means of artificial carbon sink can be used as adjustment tools under the carbon neutrality system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To achieve the goal of 'Net-zero Europe' by 2050, the European Union (EU) has set up detailed policies in the fields of energy and climate. This paper summarizes the main characteristics of relevant policies in the EU and UK and their implications for China by reviewing these policies in the achievement of the carbon neutrality goal and other goals in the energy and climate fields. The characteristics of these energy and climate policies include: ① Top-down and bottom-up approaches are adopted to distribute the EU' s overall emission reduction targets to member states in accordance with the principle of fairness, and each member state formulates and adjusts its own goals to ensure the realization of the overall goals. ② Detailed transition plans are formulated for the power, industry, transportation, and building sectors; importance is attached to the application of new and renewable energy technologies such as solar, wind, and hydrogen energy; specific goals are set concerning coal power transition, nuclear energy development, energy efficiency improvement, carbon capture and storage, electrification, and building renovations; and the importance of energy security in transition planning is stressed. ③ A sound and mature emissions trading system and a fair transition mechanism are established to support the realization of the transition goals, and developing countries are helped to reduce emissions through technical dialogues and climate financing. To reach peak carbon emissions and achieve carbon neutrality, China should develop relevant roadmaps at national, sectoral, and provincial levels and strengthen R&D of key decarbonization technologies. At the same time, China should enhance its regulatory regime, and improve the carbon emissions trading system, the green financial system, and the just transition mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the background of exhaustion of the traditional fossil energy sources and environmental deterioration, developing renewable energy has become a strategic choice for countries to achieve energy sustainable utilization and carbon neutrality target. Different renewable energy technical plans have different characteristics under multiple criteria. Therefore, before the further exploitation of renewable energy sources, it is of great significance to evaluate the comprehensive performance of different plans and then determine the best renewable energy sources. However, the commonly used weight calculation methods in the existing renewable energy evaluation have obvious shortcomings, such as the randomness of the subjective method is strong and the gap in the weight allocation of the objective method is too large, which affect the reliability and accuracy of the sorting result. In this paper, a novel weight calculation method based on non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) is proposed, and is applied to renewable energy evaluation. The study in this paper focuses on methodology. Firstly, for the linear normalized and Zeros normalized evaluation data, the differences between renewable energy plans in the two normalized evaluation data are measured, and the ranking deviations of the two normalized data are calculated. Then, the multi-objective weight solving model is constructed in terms of plans differences minimization and ranking vectors deviations minimization. The NSGA-II algorithm is applied to the optimization of multi-objective functions to find the Pareto non-dominated solution, so as to determine the weight values of each evaluation index. Finally, the TOPSIS method is used to determine the relative closeness value of each plan, and the rankings of renewable energy technical plans are achieved. Based on the actual renewable energy development data of a province in China, experiments were carried out to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Experimental results show that the proposed method performs better than some popular renewable energy evaluation methods. [Display omitted] • Propose a novel evaluation method for renewable energy technical plans. • Apply non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II to determine the index weights. • Compared with the existing evaluation method, the proposed method performs better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current legal and policy system of renewable energy in China has set up a framework of policy instruments, which provides an important foundation for dealing with climate change and promoting the healthy development of the renewable energy industry with the goal of "carbon neutrality" and "emission peak". However, the current policy instruments cannot meet the needs for rapid development of the renewable energy industry. This paper investigates, analyzes, and concludes the status of renewable energy development along with related policy instruments in different renewable energy sources by literature and points out the problems of current policy instruments, and puts forward corresponding countermeasures. Moreover, from the perspective of energy consumption market transformation, the authors carried out an analysis of China's challenges of policy instruments, pointing out that China's renewable energy policy instruments have the potential to take one step further in the areas of the regulatory system, legal system and legal security system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To achieve the goal of "carbon peaking and carbon neutrality", China is vigorously developing renewable energy. This paper aims to examine the major contributors to regional inequality in renewable energy consumption by analyzing the 30 provinces in China. We have analyzed the inequality of China's renewable energy consumption with Dagum Gini coefficient, and then use the Generalized Divisia Index Model (GDIM) to decompose the influencing factors contributing to the inequality of renewable energy consumption. The main conclusions are summarized as follows: First, renewable energy consumption was higher in the western region than in the central and eastern regions, and the regional inequality in renewable energy consumption have increased over time. Second, the study reveals that inter-group disparity is the primary source of regional inequality in renewable energy consumption in China. Third, at the national level, the results of the GDIM decomposition show that economic development continues to rely on fossil energy consumption, which negatively impacts the low-carbon transition of energy. Given China's complex geographical conditions, it is crucial for different provinces to develop their own strategies for renewable energy development, taking into account unique resources and challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a non-Arctic country and a major energy consumer, China is increasingly interested in participating in Arctic energy development. This study aims to investigate potential strategies to promote China's participation in Arctic energy development. Accordingly, this study analyzes the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) of China's participation in Arctic energy development based on a discussion of the current status of Arctic energy development and the Arctic policies of major countries. In addition, this work develops strategies in accordance with the above analysis. The results show that China has strengths in terms of capital, energy demand, policy support, and international cooperation when participating in Arctic energy development, while its weaknesses include the lack of core technology and equipment, high carbon intensity of energy development, and geographical disadvantage. China faces opportunities stemming from conflicts among Arctic states, the advancement of global carbon neutrality, and the development of Arctic waterway while facing threats such as increased competition, international public opinion pressure, high development costs, environmental risks, and pandemic instability. Under an integrated framework, this work offers four strategies: Strength-Opportunity (SO), Strength-Threat (ST), Weakness-Opportunity (WO), and Weakness-Threat (WT). Finally, this study proposes specific measures in four areas, including strengthening policy support, promoting technical research and development, enhancing international cooperation, and improving enterprise competitiveness. [Display omitted] • This study examines China's participation in Arctic energy development. • This paper reviews the status of fossil and non-fossil energy in the Arctic. • This study compares the Arctic energy development strategies of major countries. • This study proposes four strategies, namely SO, ST, WO, and WT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An electricity substitution strategy that replaces fossil fuels such as coal and oil with electricity in end-use energy consumption, can effectively contribute to an energy transition and the early achievement of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality targets. As the benefits of electricity substitution are not synchronized across China's regions, this paper uses a three-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to measure the efficiency of electric energy substitution in 30 provinces of China in 2017. The results show that both environmental factors and random errors have significant effects on energy efficiency. After eliminating these influences, the efficiency of electrical energy substitution among regions presented the following pattern: "high in the east and low in the west". According to the evaluation results, this paper proposes corresponding suggestions for the development of electrical energy substitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]