Research On Energy Efficiency Rebound Effects Base On System Perspective

The enormous impact of energy price fluctuations on the global economy once again proved the scarcity and importance of energy. With rapid economic development in China, the growing energy demand and energy supply shortages become a dual pressure and made a number of energy economic policies to promote energy efficiency to solve the problem of energy supply and demand gap. However, whether the original intention of policy-making, where the improvement of energy efficiency in reducing the impact of energy consumption, works or not is an uncertain issue. The energy efficiency improvement of a product or service will reduce the nominal energy consumption, but the traditional view ignores the decline in energy price and the demand rebound caused by the decline of the cost of energy usage. In other words, when the energy efficiency increases, the relative price of energy will fall down, while the response of macro-economic system to such price shocks is to increase the energy usage as a means to increase output or reduce the production costs in order to achieve an economic increasement, these actions will cause the amount of energy saving be to some extent offset by energy efficiency improvements. This is the rebound effect in energy economics theory. Based on the existence of the rebound effect, which on the one hand makes the effectiveness of energy efficiency imprevement to be a considerable uncertain question, and the other hand has different effect and with different scopes for different sectors. This article takes the perspective of the system rebound effect of energy efficiency, conducts a comprehensive study of energy - economy - environment system, a complex system, and focuses on the rebound effect of energy efficiency, to give advices through analysis of its possible impact in entire national system, allowing lower energy consumption policy can play an effective role, finding a rational way to enhance China's energy efficiency to address the gap between growing energy demand and increasing scarcity of energy supply.This paper first analyzes the impact of energy efficiency-related factors, and then from the perspective of system dynamics, emphases a systematic point of view to look at energy issues, and establishes a causal-loop diagrams between energy efficiency-related factors, and on this basis to analyze the reason of energy efficiency rebound effect the efficiency and its impact pathes. Qualitative analysis results show that the ineffectiveness of energy efficiency policies often caused by the lack of attention to energy efficiency rebound effect. Furthermore, this article uses a computable general equilibrium model with different sectors to analysis each sector's energy efficiency rebound effect and its influence to the ecomonic system in a quantitative simulation analysis. Finally, conclusions and policy recommendations are given according to calculation results.