Abstract
There has always been controversy over how renewable energy technologies can play a role in reducing carbon emissions. Based on the energy patent data and the economic data of 244 prefecture-level cities from 2007 to 2017 in China, we explore the carbon reduction effect of renewable energy technology and its mechanism from the perspective of energy production, conservation, and management. The two-way fixed effect, instrumental variable, spatial Durbin, and mediation effect models are employed to explore empirical results. We found that (1) the impact of renewable energy technologies on carbon emissions is nonlinear, with an inverted U shape. However, this inverted U-shaped relationship only exists locally in cities and there are uncertainties in adjacent cities, which indicates that cross-regional cooperation in renewable energy technology needs to be improved. (2) The mechanism analysis shows that industrial agglomeration and energy consumption scale are the channels that renewable energy technologies affect carbon emissions. Thus, the implicit carbon emissions generated by industrial agglomeration and the failure to green upgrade energy consumption are the main reasons for the inverted U-shaped relationship. (3) The carbon reduction effect of renewable energy technologies of conservation type takes effect first, and renewable energy technologies of production type do not reduce carbon emissions in non-eastern cities, which means that non-eastern cities are likely to become pollution havens. This study provides evidence for renewable energy technologies to achieve efficient carbon emission reduction and cross-regional technical cooperation.
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Acknowledgements
The authors wish to gratefully acknowledge the editors and reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments that improved the manuscript.
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This work was supported by the Open Fund of Sichuan Oil and Gas Development Research Center (SKB23-06) and the Institute for Healthy Cities of Chengdu (2023ZC06).
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Fang Qu: conceptualization, writing, collecting data, methodology, revision, and proofreading. Chun-Mei Li: revision and proofreading.
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Appendices
Appendix 1
Table 17 is a supplement to Table 2, where population density (lnPOP), transportation infrastructure (lnTI), government intervention (lnGOV), and urbanization (lnURB) have positive impacts on carbon emissions (Huang et al. 2021; Zhang and Cheng 2009). The main reason why government regulation increases carbon emissions is its one-size-fits-all intervention. The first term of economic development (lnpGDP) is positive, while the second term (lnpGDP2) is negative, which is consistent with the assumption of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC). This implies that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between economic development and pollution emissions (Chen et al. 2022c), where initially pollution increases with economic development but eventually decreases. Finally, the impact of green space (lnGS), foreign direct investment (lnFDI), and financial development (lnFD) on carbon emissions is uncertain.
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Qu, ., Li, CM. Carbon emission reduction effect of renewable energy technology innovation: a nonlinear investigation from China’s city level. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 98314–98337 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-29245-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-29245-7