• Energy Research
• AU close

Abstract The Chinese government has made an important effort to diversify the country’s energy mix and exploit different sources of renewable energy. Although China’s installed wind power capacity has experienced a dramatic expansion over the past five years, electricity generation from wind power has not increased as expected. This paper aims to present the current status of wind generation in China and analyze the causes of the large discrepancy between installed capacity and generation. We find that this is mainly caused by the inadequacy of the power transmission grid, the absence of economic incentives to transmission and backup generation providers, and the lack of a generation-based renewable portfolio standard.

Abstract Substituting energy with capital (SEC) in economic productions has become a common practice both for business owners and policy-makers to improve their energy and environmental efficiency. However, seldom previous studies on energy efficiency and/or environmental performance evaluation took this role into account. This paper aims to shed some light on the effects of SEC on China's aggregated energy and environmental efficiency (AEEE) within a parametric stochastic frontier analysis framework. Moreover, influencing factors of regional efficiency score are also discussed using a pooled regression model. The results indicate that SEC poses significant effects on improving China's AEEE, and this impact appears obvious regional variation that regions with lower efficiency scores hold more extensive potential to improve their AEEE by means of SEC. Furthermore, upgrading industrial structure and decreasing the proportion of coal in energy consumption make great sense to improve China's AEEE.