The achievement, significance and future prospect of China's renewable energy initiative

Abstract

China's high-speed economic growth and ambitious urbanization depend heavily on the massive consumption of fossil fuel. However, the overdependence on the depleting fossil fuels causes severe environmental problems, making China the largest energy consumer and the biggest CO 2 emitter in the world. Faced with significant challenges in terms of managing its environment and moving forward with the concept of sustainable economic development, the Chinese government plans to move away from fossil fuels and rely on renewables such as hydropower, wind power, solar power, biomass power and nuclear power. In this paper, the current status of China's renewable energy deployment and the ongoing development projects are summarized and discussed. Most recent developments of major renewable energy sources are clearly reviewed. Additionally, the renewable energy development policies including laws and regulations, economic encouragement, technical research and development are also summarized. This study showcases China's achievements in exploiting its abundant domestic renewable energy sources to meet the future energy demand and reducing carbon emissions. To move toward a low carbon society, technological progress and policy improvements are needed for improving grid access (wind), securing nuclear fuel supplies and managing safety protocols (nuclear), integrating supply chains to achieve indigenous manufacture of technologies across supply chains (solar). Beyond that, a preliminary prediction of the development of China's future renewable energy developments, and proposes targeted countermeasures and suggestions are proposed. The proposal involves developing smart-grid system, investing on renewable energy research, improving the feed-in tariff system and clarifying the subsidy system.

Evolution of Low Carbon Supply Chain Research: A Systematic Bibliometric Analysis

“…It emphasizes the timely collection and calculation of the carbon footprint of all types of buildings, allowing for a reasonable quantification of carbon emissions throughout the supply chain [ 58 , 66 ]. Sun [ 57 ] proposed the use of renewable energy, improved construction technology, and an integrated supply chain to realize carbon emission reduction across the supply chain and establish an effective energy-saving and emission reduction mechanism. This cluster of the literature tends to be more focused on material recycling or reuse or product life cycle assessment [ 67 ].…”

Influencing factors of consumers’ buying intention of solar energy: a structural equation modeling approach

“…Nonetheless, reliance on traditional thermal power might bring the country to an unfavorable climate change position (Bai et al 2022 ). Lastly, China has massive solar power potential that, if adequately used, might mitigate the current climate and energy challenges (Sun 2020 ).…”

Multi‐objective economic dispatch of power system with wind farm considering flexible load response

“…1 However, wind power in China is facing some technical challenges and scheduling problems in the process, and the imbalance between the distribution of the wind power industry and the development of the national economy has always existed. 2 Therefore, wind power curtailment problems need to be solved urgently, 3 especially in Northwest China, where the average rate of wind curtailment reaches 15%. 4 It cannot be ignored that wind energy has strong uncertainty, and the basic form of power system will be changed when a high proportion of wind energy is linked to the electric grid.…”

“…Wind power generation has gradually become one of the most promising ways of power generation, countries around the world are vigorously promoting the development of related industries 1 . However, wind power in China is facing some technical challenges and scheduling problems in the process, and the imbalance between the distribution of the wind power industry and the development of the national economy has always existed 2 . Therefore, wind power curtailment problems need to be solved urgently, 3 especially in Northwest China, where the average rate of wind curtailment reaches 15% 4 …”