Coal or electricity? An evolutionary game approach to investigate fuel choices of urban heat supply systems

Yujuan Fang, Laijun Chen, Shengwei Mei, Wei Wei, Shaowei Huang and Feng Liu

Energy, 2019, vol. 181, issue C, 107-122

Abstract: There is a growing tendency to replace coal heating with electric heating in urban heat supply systems to reduce the air pollution and achieve defossilisation. To promote the use of electric heating, the economic incentive from governments will play a decisive role. This paper investigates the impact of taxation and subsidy policies on the long-term evolution of urban heat supply systems based on the evolutionary game theory. The evolutionary stable strategy is calculated which yields the fraction of each kind of heating strategy as well as the regulatory policy in a steady state. Four scenarios including both static and dynamic policy design mechanisms are simulated. The dynamic policy design is formulated as an optimal control problem, and the optimal evolutionary trajectory is obtained from the proposed optimal parameter design algorithm. Simulation results indicate that the amount of electric heating can be flexibly and accurately controlled by the government through the design of taxation and subsidy policies. It is shown in the case study that taxations could be more efficient than subsidies to encourage using electric heating, and a combination of dynamic taxation and dynamic subsidy policies can expedite the heating system electrification process.

Keywords: Evolutionary game theory; Evolutionary stable strategy; Policy design; Urban heat supply system; Taxation and subsidies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544219307625
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:181:y:2019:i:c:p:107-122

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2019.04.129

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().