Research On Low-carbon Power Transition Planning And Decision Making Aligned With China’s Carbon Neutral Target

The carbon peaking and carbon neutral targets are China’s pledge to mitigate the longterm carbon emissions,and also the programmatic guidance of high-quality social development and low-carbon energy transition.The power sector,consuming over 50%of total coal resource,determines the national carbon mitigation performance in China.This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of China’s low-carbon power transition aligned with carbon neutral target.Considering the coordination of safety,economics and lowcarbon for power development,this paper discusses the future landscape,boundary conditions,structural transition and system operation characteristics to provide a revealing insight into the pathways and mechanisms of deep low-carbon transition for China’s power sector.The focuses and findings in this paper are depicted as follows:(1)The review of China’s power industry during 2010～2020 provides the stastical foundations and shows the differences in energy and economic endowments among provinces in China make the regional low-carbon power transition heterogeneous,which forces the national coordination of China’s power planning.Therefore,this paper constructs a top-down research framework of low-carbon power transition for national carbon mitigation and discusses the practical and feasible power transition paths and technical roadmap under different future scenarios.The research framework involves macro energy-economy scenario deduction,power low-carbon transition planning,power system operation simulation,comprehensive decision-making and multi-level perspective analysis of transitin pathways.(2)This paper deduces the trend of medium-and long-term macro economy-energypower landscape under the targets of carbon peaking and carbon neutral referring to the historical process of developed countries and the professional outlook about China’s development from various authorities.And then this paper designs 12 power transition scenarios according to carbon budget,power demand and low-carbon technology,in order to comprehensively cover various possibilities.(3)From the perspective of economic carbon mitigation,this paper conducts an extended Integrated Resource Stretegic Planning model to optimize the deployment of China’s power transition under the carbon neutral target,by involving the transition cost of coal power.It can screen out the better choices between the four transition modes of CCS retrofit.BECCS retrofit,stranded disposal and life-extended for coal power.(4)From the perspective of power safety,this paper employs the operation simulation tools for power system,considering the intermittency of new energy output,to appraise the operational reliability of the power transition scenarios proposed in Chapter 5 in the time slice of 8760 hours.The power operation simulation and power capacity expansion model can make an integral optimization and appraisal of power planning.(5)Using the multi-attribute decision-making methods,this paper makes a comprehensive decision-making evaluation of low-carbon power transition scenarios from the subjective and objective perspectives to cordinate the triangle of safety,economics and low-carbon.Involving more information can help make the transition decision-making results more scientific and reasonable,and obtain the recommended transition schemes and appropriate roadmap for carbon neutral target.(6)The valuable findings are concluded as follows.The scale of coal-fired power plants before 2030 determines the emission reduction process of the power industry.The higher the peak scale of coal-fired power,the higher the total cost of power in the future planning period,resulting in a certain crowding out effect on new energy and energy storage technology,and a larger scale of coal-biomass cofiring units coupling with CCS should be retrofitted to realize negative power emission.If aiming at the minimum cost for the power transition by 2060,China should promote the power sector to achieve carbon peak at an early and low level,to create emission space for other sectors,deal with the risk of delaying national carbon peaking target,and reduce transition costs.If aiming at the reliable power supply,China should coordinate various power resources with the share of coal power capacity over 30%,new energy power capacity accounting for 40%and the energy storage capacity accounting for 4%or even more by 2030 to achieve the carbon peak target.Especially,the total capacity of wind and solar power should be limitted within 1500 GW and the share of new energy generation would achieve over 20%.In the power system to achieve deep decarbonization,the operation mode and supply-demand balance mechanism of the power system would change qualitatively.New energy power would be the dual pillar of power and electricity.Various energy storage and demand-side resources would be crucial to the power balance.Large stable and controllable power generators would be still indispensable to support the power system.Under the collaborative concept of "safety,economy and low-carbon",it is not the best choice for the power industry to achieve a low-level carbon emission peak earlier through the planning period.It is more critical to reasonably grasp the rhythm of carbon mitigation for power sector(peaking at 2028-2030,realizing net-zero emission around 2050)and formulate forward-looking technology development strategies.By 2060,the carbon-neutral power system would recontruct the setup into a mix of "new energy capacity accounting for 60%,large stable and controllable power capacity with 15%.energy storage with 20%and other resources with 5%".