Carbon Pricing, Green Certificates, and Capacity Compensation: Synergistic Effects on Absorption

This paper develops a policy combination optimization framework for clean energy absorption in the East China Grid, targeting the coordination challenge among carbon pricing, tradable green certificates, and capacity compensation mechanisms. The framework establishes parameterized logarithmic response functions for each policy instrument, introduces pairwise interaction terms to capture synergistic effects, and formulates an optimization model balancing absorption improvement against equivalent social costs under budget constraints. A case study validates the framework across three budget scenarios. Results show that under the medium budget, the optimal combination achieves 6.2 percentage points absorption improvement with a synergy term of 1.1 percentage points, exceeding the best single-policy scheme by 2.7 percentage points. The coordinated portfolio attains a policy cost-effectiveness ratio of 0.419 pp/100M CNY, demonstrating measurable advantages in both absorption performance and resource efficiency compared to isolated single-instrument approaches.