Driving factors of electric carbon productivity change based on regional and sectoral dimensions in China

In order to reduce carbon emissions and maintain economic development in the power industry of China, the improvement of electric carbon productivity (ECP) creates more efficiency. The carbon emission estimation in the power industry is significant to the ECP calculation in this study. Thus, to make the ECP calculation more reasonable and fair, this study estimates carbon emissions from the power industry by the consumption-based accounting principle considering power transfers among the provinces. In addition, this research analyzes seven driving factors of ECP change in China by exploring the time series decomposition (2003–2015) from the power consumption perspective. The Logarithmic Mean Divisia Index (LMDI) method takes the regional and departmental dimensions into consideration. By applying the data from 30 provinces (including province-level municipalities) and three industrial sectors between 2010 and 2015, the influencing factors of ECP in each province and each industrial sector are discussed. The results show that: 1) Regional and industrial sector ECP, per capita GDP are the driving factors of increasing ECP; conversely, environmental efficiency of power consumption, industrial structure effect from the perspective of power consumption, economic efficiency effect of power consumption, and the ratio of total population to electric CO₂ emissions play leading roles in the decline of ECP. 2) From 2003 to 2015, there are four distinct stages of the ECP changes. 3) The sub-regional decomposition indicates, during 2010–2015, the main power exporters have higher or medium level ECP, and the main power importers with rapid economic development manifest lower or medium level ECP. 4) Instead of solely focusing on GDP, the Chinese government should pay more attention to increasing the economic and environmental efficiency of power utilization. 5) The sub-sector decomposition shows, during 2010–2015, although the economic and environmental efficiency of power utilization are negative in the secondary industry, they are the greatest among the three industrial sectors, and the influence of the economic scale effect is stronger than that of technological impact on different industrial sectors. Finally, several conclusions are obtained which might be useful for the central and local governments to improve the national and regional ECPs.