Study On The External Cost Of Coal Power In China

The power industry is one of the most important energy industries of China’s nationaleconomic development, also, it is a basic industry which can support our society to keepprogressing. Since the year of2011, China has surpassed the U.S. as the world’s largestelectricity producer and consumer countries. Because of China’s coal-based resourceendowments, coal power generation becomes the major part of China’s power structure,thermal power generation has been accounted for more than80percent of China’s totalgenerating capacity.On the other hand, while promoting China’s rapid economic development, coal powergeneration does a great deal of harm to the ecological environment and human health.However, the power producers take no responsibility for the impact, which leads to seriousnegative externalities.Coal power generation exists as a few of continuous life cycle processes, including coalmining, transportation and storage, as well as coal-fired generation in thermal power plants.The whole process not only brings serious pollution which degrades our environment,increases the consumption of resources, but also let a huge amount of practitioners pay theprice of life or health.Based on the facts above, in order to realize the coordinated development of theeconomic, society, environment and the industrial chain of coal power generation, scientificanalysis and accounting of the negative externality cost are necessary. Hence, relatedbusinesses can fully aware of the negative externalities caused by their production and theneffectively control the management to reduce it.In this paper, comprehensive analysis on the negative externalities of China’s coalpower generation were done, including upstream and downstream of coal mining,transportation, storage and coal-fired generation in power plants. After that, quantitativeresearches which focused on parts of them were conducted. Based on the above work, Idemonstrated the difficulties of correcting the negative externalities. Moreover, advices wereprovided for reducing the negative externalities from the economics externalities theoreticalpoint of view. These advices would contribute to the sustainable economic development ofChina and be meaningful for energy conservation in the future.