The Research On China’s Energy Rebound Effect Based On Lmdi Method

The sustainable use of energy is crucial to a country or a region’s economic development, environmental protection and social stability. With an in-depth development of industrialization, the contradiction between supply and demand of world energy has become increasingly acute. Many countries ascended the energy strategy to the national strategic level. As the world’s largest developing country, China has been the largest coal consumer in the world since1984.China has accounted for47.8%of global coal consumption in2012and accounted for nearly half of global consumption in2013. The large-scale use of petrochemical energy has generated serious negative external effects. As China’s industrialization and urbanization into the accelerated development stage, China’s energy consumption has soared, which leads to external dependence gradually improving and energy security risk increasing. It is an important issue for China to balance the ecological protection red line, the energy security red line and the economic growth baseline.On the current developing stage in our country, the reduction of total energy consumption caused by the energy efficiency increasing is not as expected. The reason is that there exists Energy Rebound Effect in energy consumption. Energy Rebound Effect means that technological progress can improve energy efficiency, but will also stimulate more energy use and reduce the energy savings. Therefore, the analysis of energy rebound effect is the key to enhance the effectiveness of China’s energy policies. Based on the mechanism of energy rebound and current energy utilization situation in China, this paper proposes the "Energy Saving Inefficient Trap" and energy rebound effect curve. The analysis shows that, energy rebound effect is closely related to the economic development mode in a country. The more primary economic development mode is, the greater energy rebound effect will be. Energy consumption saving by technological advance will be reduced, and be in the "Energy Saving Inefficient Trap". This paper sets up an estimating framework of energy rebound effect based on LMDI Method and estimates the rebound effect in China from1991to2011.The results indicates that there is significant energy rebound effect in China now and China is in the second stage of the energy rebound effect. Finally, according to the empirical results, this paper proposes suggestions to suppress the energy rebound effect via transformation of the economic development mode.