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As the largest developing country in the world, China has promised to peak the carbon dioxide emissions before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060 to mitigate the greenhouse effect. In the meantime, the electric power industry is playing a key role in achieving this ambitious target through “electricity substitution” and “clean substitution” strategies and constructing the “new type of power system”. Given this background, a specific and detailed model for the electric power supply structure transformation (EPSST) model is proposed in this rapid communication for the first time, which helps to analyse the transformation more reasonably. The proposed EPSST model aims to minimize the total costs for electric power supply structure transformation with the carbon neutrality constraints considered. Besides, the other constraints associated with the construction and retirement of different types of power plants, the balance between power supply and demand, and carbon sinks are also considered. Two scenarios aiming to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060 and 2055 are respectively studied and corresponding analyses for the transformation are also performed. The results show the feasibility of the proposed EPSST model and finally a macroscopic forecast for the future electric power industry is given.

China has promised to peak carbon emission before 2030 and to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060 (i.e., “double carbon” goal). Under this background, the emission reduction transformation path of China's electric power industry is studied in this paper. First, several boundary conditions (i.e., assumptions) of electric power structure transformation (i.e., the costs of power generations, the costs of energy storage systems, the developments of carbon sinks, the emission factors, and the quotas of carbon sinks) are given considering the whole society electricity consumption in the future. Second, a transformation path optimization model is established aim to minimize the total cost in the electric power industry. Then, according to the optimization results, the transformation predictions for the power industry under the ''30·60 scenario'' (i.e., the scenario that can achieve carbon peak and carbon neutrality before 2030 and 2060) are analyzed in detail, and are compared with the ones of ''2 °C scenario'' and ''1.5 °C scenario'' defined by IPCC. Furthermore, the influence of different carbon prices on the transformation path is also analyzed. It can be concluded from the simulation results that the ''30·60 scenario'' is a scenario between ''2 °C scenario'' and ''1.5 °C scenario'', and carbon emission can be reduced rapidly under the guidance of high carbon prices.