Abstract
The energy transition from coal and oil to renewable energy, nuclear energy, and natural gas is a fundamental way for emission reduction of China’s power generation sector. Until now, research on the drivers of CO2 emissions from China’s power generation sector has generally evaluated the energy mix as a whole, with a lack of exploration of the decomposition of different types of energy. This paper uses both index decomposition analysis (IDA) and structural decomposition analysis (SDA) to explore the impacts of energy transition on CO2 emissions in the power generation sector during periods of 2002–2007, 2007–2012, and 2012–2017. We find that the results of IDA and SDA are almost consistent, indicating that our results are robust. During the whole study period, CO2 emissions of power generation sector increased by 2447 Mt, of which the fossil fuel structure significantly contributed 642 Mt of incremental emissions (IDA). The thermal power generation efficiency was a dominator for reducing emissions, with a total reduction of 586 Mt (IDA). Simultaneously, the impacts of renewable energy and nuclear energy on emission reduction tend to be strengthening over time, with values changing from 38 Mt and −5 Mt in 2002-2007 to −219 Mt and −83 Mt (IDA) in 2012-2017, respectively. Based on the results, we put forward some suggestions such as promoting coal-to-gas, renewable energy, and nuclear energy in power generation to cut down CO2 emissions of China’s power generation sector.
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Data availability
The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are available in the National Bureau of Statistics of China, China Energy Statistics Yearbook, and China Electricity Statistical Yearbook http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/ndsj/.
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We thank the reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.
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This work was funded by the Major Program of Social Science Foundation of Tianjin Municipal Education Commission (No. 2016JWZD04) and the Ministry of Education of Humanities and Social Science Research Fund Plan (No. 15YJA790091).
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YW did the data collection and decomposition analysis and writing the original draft. TZ came up with this research idea and financially supported this work. JW analyzed existing literatures and provided a lot of work for the revision of the paper. XZ was responsible for the preliminary investigation and data collection. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Wei, Y., Zhao, T., Wang, J. et al. Exploring the impact of transition in energy mix on the CO2 emissions from China’s power generation sector based on IDA and SDA. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 30858–30872 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-12599-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-12599-1