Effectiveness of clean development policies on coal-fired power generation: an empirical study in China

Coal-fired power will remain China’s primary source of electricity for a long time to come. The clean development of coal-fired power generation has become an important strategic choice for China’s energy transformation. Based on collecting and sorting out the driving policies for China’s clean development of coal-fired power generation from 1997 to 2016, firstly, we reviewed the historical evolution of these policies in terms of the policy quantity, policy theme, and policy instrument. Then, we designed the scoring criteria to quantify the policies. Finally, the effectiveness of the overall policies and different policy instruments was empirically analyzed by the econometric model built on the basis of Cobb-Douglas production function. The results show that the annual release amount of driving policies for the clean development of coal-fired power in China presents a trend of fluctuating growth. Policy themes are mainly divided into two parts, namely production capacity management and air pollutants control; policy instruments mainly include elimination of backward units, project approval, standards, generation price regulation, tax incentives, loan policy, and information publicity; the overall policies have significant positive effects on the clean development of coal-fired power industry; in terms of policy instruments, the elimination of backward units and generation price regulation have significant effects on improving the energy efficiency; project approval and generation price regulation are effective for reducing SO₂ emissions rate; and the effects of standards, tax incentives, loan policy, and information publicity on the clean development of coal-fired power are not significant. On these bases, some policy implications to further promote the clean development of coal-fired power industry are provided.