Impacts of local governments' wind power policy and preferences on wind power development: an empirical analysis of China

Local governments in China have implemented several forms of wind power policies, such as environmental-side policies (ESP), supply-side policies (SSP), and demand-side policies (DSP), to improve the use and development of renewable energy. Consequently, it is important to ascertain which policies local governments prefer to use and how these various policies affect local wind power development (WPD). Furthermore, as there are considerable regional disparities in wind energy resources, economic levels and contribution to the overall energy system across the provinces, confirming whether these differences play a role in policy efficacy is crucial. To address these issues, this study applied the content analysis method to quantify the policies issued by China's provinces from 2001 to 2020 from the perspective of policy tools and developed a fixed-effects vector decomposition regression model to analyse the impact of wind power policies on WPD. The findings demonstrate that (1) ESP, SSP and DSP have made significant contributions to promoting WPD, with SSP having the greatest influence on WPD. (2) There appears to be a disconnect between policy preferences and their impact on WPD. Although the government prefers to employ ESP, as it is more conducive to WPD, ESP has less impact on WPD than SSP. (3) Regional heterogeneity influences wind power policy. The policies of provinces with low economic levels, rich wind energy resources and high regional electricity contribution have a stronger impact on WPD.