The drivers of China's national and regional energy consumption structure under environmental regulation

Optimizing energy consumption structure (ECS) is the key to reduce pollution emissions and develop a green economy. Understanding the effect of each influencing factor on ECS is conducive to providing theoretical reference for the formulation of energy and environmental policies, howbeit it lacks studies about the main drivers of national and regional ECS in China. With the consideration of increasingly standardized formal environmental regulation (FER), an extended LMDI model is constructed to decompose the national and regional ECS from 1998 to 2017 into ten influencing factors. The ultimate goals of this concept are to explore the dominant factors of national and regional ECS at different time stages by employing temporal decomposition model, and to investigate the primary drivers that cause the disparity between provincial ECS and national average ECS by applying spatial decomposition model. The results reveal that the effect of FER, the reciprocal of industrial pollution control investment per unit GDP and economic development are the main factors leading to the change of national and regional ECS, specifically FER has a stronger effect on resource-based regions. Also, R&D intensity and R&D efficiency are important factors for ECS change. Energy efficiency and Per capita energy production are the leading factors of ECS disparity between 30 provinces and the national average. What's more, FER and R&D factors play important roles. Policy suggestions are put forward according to the results. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.