中国における地域間電力送電とエネルギー転換

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides a rigorous empirical framework for evaluating transmission infrastructure's impact on energy transition, with methodological innovations like quantile regression and mechanism tests.

🏢実務担当者:Useful for utilities and grid operators planning transmission investments, highlighting the importance of complementary storage and regional policies.

🏛政策担当者:Informs energy policy design, emphasizing that transmission alone is insufficient and must be paired with storage and environmental governance.

China's energy resources and its electricity demand are inversely distributed: wind, solar, and hydropower potential is concentrated in the western and northern provinces, whereas load centers cluster along the eastern and central seaboard. As renewable capacity expands rapidly under the Dual Carbon agenda, the large-scale spatial reallocation of electricity embodied in the West-to-East Electricity Transmission program has become a central pillar of national energy strategy. Whether such transmission is in fact associated with cleaner provincial energy structures, however, remains empirically unresolved. This study examines the question with a panel of 30 Chinese provinces covering 2000–2018. Energy transition is measured by a carbon-weighted energy-consumption index that incorporates the full energy mix and the carbon intensity of each energy source, and transmission exposure is measured by the ratio of net electricity transfers to generation. The analysis proceeds in four steps. We first estimate a baseline two-way fixed-effects model with province-clustered inference, validated by a wild cluster bootstrap. We then trace the association across the distribution of transition performance using quantile regressions. We next examine heterogeneity across exporting regions, importing regions, and environmental-regulation regimes. We close with bootstrap-based mechanism tests together with System-GMM robustness checks. The findings are as follows. First, greater transmission intensity is associated with a lower carbon-weighted energy index, and therefore with cleaner provincial energy structures. Second, the association is non-linear across transmission-intensity levels: it can be positive at low intensity, consistent with thermal-power balancing, but turns negative and transition-promoting at higher intensity, consistent with scale economies in clean-energy integration. Third, the benefits are conditional on regional roles and institutions: exporting regions respond mainly through green technology upgrading, importing regions through clean-electricity availability, and stronger environmental regulation amplifies the transition-promoting association. Grid expansion alone is therefore not sufficient for decarbonization. Transmission investment should be coordinated with storage deployment, regionally differentiated industrial policy, and environmental governance.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esr.2026.102341first seen 2026-08-24 04:58:06