The Effect Of Carbon Mitigation Policies On China’s Power Generation Industry

Nowadays,global warming has become an important political and economic issues we faced with. The continuous emission of greenhouse gases, represented by CO₂, lead to global warming. The development of low-carbon power help to change the traditional development mode of China’s power generation industry along with high pollution, high emissions and high energy consumption. In particular, low-carbon power is the only way to realize the low-carbon economy development in China. Therefore, it is very important to explore the impact of CO₂ emission reduction policies on China’s power generation industry.This study was divided into five parts. First, through the literature review, this part mainly combs and analyzed the status quo of low-carbon economy, low carbon development in Chian’s power generation industry, then raised the focus, research significance and framework structure of this study. Second, this part provided the theoretical basis, including sustainable development theory, low-carbon economy development theory, low-carbon power theory and emission mitigation policy, which laid a solid theoretical foundation for further study. Third, based on the improved Kaya identity, the LMDI decomposition is used to explore the main factors affecting the growth of CO₂ emissions in China’s power generation industry. Fourth, input-output tables in 2010 and other relevant data were used to establish the social accounting matrix for China’s power industry. In addition, this part build a dynamic CGE model, set up the benchmark scenario and then twelve kinds emissions reduction scenarios according to different carbon tax rate, different industrial scope, allocation ways of emission trading in its implementation process, in order to explore the impact of different emission reduction scenarios on carbon emissions, carbon emissions intensity, output and energy consumption. Some valuable policy recommendations were proposed.The results showed that:（1） the effect of production activity and energy intensity were the positive and negative determining factors of CO₂ emissions growth, respectively. And the energy structure effect was another major factor to inhibit the growth of CO₂ emissions in China’s power generation industry.（2） The carbon tax was conducive to reducing CO₂ emissions in power generation industry. Along with the increase of carbon tax rate, CO₂ emissions reduction would increase. However, high carbon tax rate would not effectively depress CO₂ emissions intensity. More importantly, it would have a negative effect on the output.（3） In carbon emissions trading mechanism covering the entire industry, carbon market would be more active and resources allocation was improved in all regions and industries. Therefore, power generation industry would achieve more emission reduction. The quota allocation mechanism of auction form contribute to technological progress, production process improvement. Besides, it is beneficial to the scientific assessment of the power generation enterprises to formulate the reasonable production plan.