What will China's carbon emission trading market affect with only electricity sector involvement? A CGE based study

On December 29, 2017, China's Carbon Trading Scheme (ETS) was officially launched, and it may be the largest emission trading platform in the world. This paper establishes 5 counter-measured scenarios based on the recently launched China's national ETS market and constructs a dynamic recursive Computable General Equilibrium model to study the impact of national ETS on the economy, energy, and environment. We find that the national ETS will have a negative impact on GDP by 0.19%–1.44%. The national ETS can significantly increase the price of electricity, however, the increase in the prices of other commodities will be much lower than that of electricity. As long as the mechanism of the ETS market remains unchanged, emission reduction per year will increase linearly. Economic output and CO2 emission are sensitive to Annual Decline factor (ADF). This paper argues that China's national ETS market is an effective tool to reduce CO2 emission, and we suggest that ADF could be 0.5% when allocating carbon allowance for the electricity sector. This could balance economic output and CO2 reduction. Also, it is easy to achieve the goal of “double control” (total amount and intensity) in China.