The Effects of Coal Switching and Improvements in Electricity Production Efficiency and Consumption on CO2 Mitigation Goals in China

Resumen

Although the average CO₂ emission for a person in China is only about 1/4 that of a person in the US, the government of China still made a commitment to ensure that CO₂ emissions will reach their peak in 2030 because of the ever-increasing pressure of global warming. In this work, we examined the effects of coal switching, efficiency improvements in thermal power generation and the electricity consumption of economic activities on realizing this goal. An improved STIRPAT model was developed to create the scenarios. In order to make the estimated elasticities more consistent with different variables selected to construct the formulation, a double-layer STIRPAT model was constructed, and by integrating the two equations obtained by regressing the series in each layer, we finally got the equation to describe the long-run relationship among CO₂ emissions (I_c), the share of coal in overall energy consumption (FM_C), coal intensity of thermal power generation (CI_p) and electricity intensity of GDP (EI_elec). The long term elasticities represented by the equation show that the growth of CO₂ emissions in China is quite sensitive to FM_C, CI_p and EI_elec. After that, five scenarios were developed in order to examine the effects of China?s possible different CO₂ emission reduction policies, focusing on improving FM_C, CI_p and EI_elec respectively. Through a rigorous analysis, we found that in order to realize the committed CO₂ emissions mitigating goal, China should obviously accelerate the pace in switching from coal to low carbon fuels, coupled with a consistent improvement in electricity efficiency of economic activities and a slightly slower improvement in the coal efficiency of thermal power generation.