Measurement And Application On Energy Rebound Effect

With the increasing fast continuously of the national economy and industrialization,urbanization has been accelerating, China’s energy consumption and carbon emissions was been mushrooming in the last thirty years. The unreasonable energy consumption structure and energy inefficiency problem led to the high-energy-consumption and high-emissions becoming prominent. In this growing shortage of energy supply and the increasing pressure on emissions contradiction, we get energy improving as an effective ways to cope with the contradiction, to address the twin challenge of climate change and energy security. And now,many countries are also looking to improving energy efficiency with legislation, innovation on technology, fiscal and taxation policy and government plan, so as to achieve the objective of energy saving and emission reduction.Energy efficiency improving policies have a special significance for carbon emission reduction and the climate change effects mitigating. However the energy rebound effect caused by technology progress will indirectly increase energy consumption. The magnitude of rebound effect largely determines the effectiveness of energy efficiency in mitigating energy consumption. Although energy rebound effect is not paid attention by contemporary economics and management until recent decades, it has become a hotspot issue and important field nowadays. Since the effective level of energy efficiency in mitigating energy consumption depends largely on the scale of the rebound, the potential efficiency of energy conservation will be estimated exactly under the condition of fully considering the rebound.Therefore, the further study and measurement on rebound effect can provide necessary theoretical and practical guiding significance for the rational formulation and effective implementation of energy policy. Recently, more academic research have focus on the impact of technology progress on energy efficiency improving, the impact of energy efficiency improving on energy consumption and carbon emissions, but the adverse effect of energy rebound effect derived from energy efficiency improving on saving energy and reducing carbon emissions has not been studied theoretically or empirically. Therefore, based on the goal to achieve energy saving and emissions reducing during the 12thFive-Year-Plan period,this study use the estimating on direct energy rebound effect, indirect energy rebound effect,national economic energy rebound effect to study the impact of energy rebound effect derivedfrom energy efficiency improving on saving energy and reducing carbon emissions in China.And the energy efficiency improving in this paper is considered to be derived from technology progress.Firstly, according to the development vein and logical relationship of current literature,this paper provides a systemic arrangement of the foreign related literature from the proposal,debate, definition, especially theoretical evolution, empirical evidence, and reveals the economy mechanism of energy rebound effect.Secondly, with China’s 30 provincial government panel data from 1996 to 2010, this study builds a co-in-tegrating equation and a panel error correction model on asymmetric demand responses of price changes to empirically analyze the direct rebound effect of urban residential electricity use. The results show that: the Chinese urban residential electricity consumption exist a partial rebound effect, and the long-term rebound effect is 0.74, the short-term rebound effect is 0.72. A majority of the expected reduction in urban residential electricity consumption from efficiency improvement could be offset due to the existence of rebound effect. The rebound effect impairs the functions of energy efficiency policies.Thirdly, this study integrates consumer demand theory with the embodied electricity of household spending from energy-input-output analysis to estimate the indirect rebound effect of energy efficiency improvements with three different measurement scenarios in the use of electricity in urban households of China. The results show that: the urban residential electricity use in China exist a partial rebound effect, the long-term indirect rebound effect is18.4% to 19.3%, and the short-term direct rebound effect is 19.8% to 20.8%.Fourthly, this paper breakthroughs the limitation of considering the technology progress as endogenous factor on the new classic economy theory of the current researches,develops a theoretical model in the CES Production Function based on the learning-by-doing theory and carries out an empirical estimation of rebound at China’s national economic level by using the nonlinear regression model. The results suggest that CES Production Function has perfect flexibility and interpretation for the energy rebound research under the technology progress endogenous framework. The backfire effect and partial rebound effect are present in long-term and short-term respectively after the implementation of the reform and opening-up policy. In short-term, the goal of energy conservation and emission reduction could toward its realization by improving energy efficiency. But, the long-term rebound is high since mostproportion of potential energy conservation is offset by a new round energy consumption resulting from rapid economic growth, China has great energy saving space in macroeconomic level.Fifthly, the resolution of energy-rebound-effect problem is a complex engineering project which involving many factors, must through the common effort with the technical engineering department, the government, the economist and socialist, to alter the consumptive conception and economic development mode. This paper put forward a policy mixture with various measures matching each other to restrain the energy rebound effect based on the empirical estimations of China and previous theoretical research.In conclusion, although technology progress will lead energy efficiency improved, the energy efficiency improving derived technology progress will give rise to energy rebound effect. The importance to mitigate energy rebound should not be disregarded, the realization of energy saving goal should not be only dependent on the improvement of energy efficiency, but also on some market—oriented policy mix including energy pricing and revenue policy to restrain effectively the energy rebound and maximize the potential energy conservation.