Measurement and Influencing Factors Research of the Energy and Power Efficiency in China: Based on the Supply-Side Structural Reform Perspective

Abstract

China’s supply-side structural reforms are facing bottlenecks in the energy and power sector, and improving energy and power efficiency and advancing reforms are urgent. To promote sustainable development, based on panel data from 30 provinces and cities in China from 2009 to 2017, this paper uses the super-efficiency DEA method to measure energy and power efficiency; explores the trend of energy and power efficiency changes before and after reform; uses the Tobit model to identify key efficiency factors; and provides policy recommendations to achieve reform goals. The research shows that China’s efficiency level takes the supply-side structural reform as the turning point and presents a volatile upward trend; from the situation of the country, technological progress, the economic development level, and the opening up level are positively correlated with the energy and power efficiency, among which the correlation coefficient between technological progress and efficiency is the highest. The study can offer a reference for the sustainable comprehensive utilization of China’s energy and power, and provide empirical evidence for other countries to improve the energy and power efficiency from the perspectives of theory and policies.

Environmental Efficiency Evaluation of China’s Power Industry Based on the Two-Stage Network Slack-Based Measure Model

“…Jia et al (2021) found that doped metal oxides can play a synergistic role in enhancing the mercury removal performance of the modified biochar [18], and this shows that the development and application of related technologies and methods can help to improve efficiency. Song et al (2020) used the super-efficiency DEA method to measure China's power efficiency level from 2009 to 2017 and explored the trend of efficiency changes before and after China's supply-side reforms, indicating that the efficiency after reforms showed a fluctuating upward trend, including technological progress, economic development, and opening to the outside world, positively affecting power efficiency [19]. Although the above studies incorporate various pollution factors that affect environmental quality into the model, only one or two of them are considered, which lacks comprehensiveness.…”

Performance Evaluation of Energy Research Projects Using DEA Super-Efficiency

“…The DEA method has been widely used to study energy efficiency as an efficiency assessment method [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. DEA is recognized in the literature as a powerful method, more suitable for performance measurement activities than traditional econometric methods, such as regression analysis and simple ratio analysis [8,15].…”

“…Therefore, in this study, a type of data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique known as super-efficiency (SE) was used to evaluate the performance of energy research projects. The data envelopment analysis method has been widely used to study energy efficiency as an efficiency assessment method [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] because it offers several key advantages. When using DEA to analyze efficiency, weight values are automatically calculated in the model itself.…”

“…As a method for analyzing the efficiency of DMUs, DEA largely divides efficient DMUs from inefficient ones [16]. Inefficient DMUs provide the scores needed to determine their ranking, but efficient DMUs all present a score of 1, which makes it difficult to discern a hierarchy among them [6,9,10,13]. This would not be an issue if the goal was to ascertain the efficiency or inefficiency of DMUs, or to divide DMUs into groups and obtain their mean values.…”

“…As DEA-SE is a variant of DEA, it can be applied directly without converting input and output into homogenized variables. It is also free from such technicalities as weight values and measurement units, and enables the accurate determination of ranking, which was impossible using typical DEA techniques [6,9,10,13].…”