Comparison and Analysis of Macro Energy Scenarios in China and a Decomposition-Based Approach to Quantifying the Impacts of Economic and Social Development

Lingying Pan, Zheng Guo, Pei Liu, Linwei Ma and Zheng Li
Additional contact information
Lingying Pan: State Key Lab of Power Systems, Department of Thermal Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
Zheng Guo: State Key Lab of Power Systems, Department of Thermal Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
Pei Liu: State Key Lab of Power Systems, Department of Thermal Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
Linwei Ma: State Key Lab of Power Systems, Department of Thermal Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
Zheng Li: State Key Lab of Power Systems, Department of Thermal Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

Energies, 2013, vol. 6, issue 7, 1-22

Abstract: China has been experiencing a rapid urbanization and industrialization progress with continuous increase in primary energy consumption. Meanwhile, China’s changing economic and society structure also introduces huge uncertainty to its future energy demand. Many energy research institutes periodically publish projections of macro energy scenarios of China up to 2030 and 2050, but these projections differ from one another in terms of total amount of energy consumption and energy flows amongst sectors. In this work, we firstly illustrate major differences between existing scenarios based on a literature survey. We then compare and analyze the different projection methods, key policy assumptions, and other boundary conditions adopted in obtaining these scenarios. Then an index decomposition method is introduced with the purpose of decoupling the impacts of economic growth and population growth on the projection to energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Our results illustrate that projections from domestic research institutes tend to be more optimistic regarding clean and sustainable utilization of coal in the future. Also, projections on energy consumption in China are exclusively linearly dependent on projections of economic and population growth in most scenarios, whilst in some other scenarios the impacts of oil price, international trade, and other drivers are also rather significant.

Keywords: macro energy scenario; China; index decomposition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/6/7/3444/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/6/7/3444/ (text/html)

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:gam:jeners:v:6:y:2013:i:7:p:3444-3465:d:27212

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().