Will auctioning promote the renewable energy generation in China?

Renewable energy generation, as part of the global effort to mitigate climate change, will play a central role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and achieving China's goal of carbon emissions peak before 2030 and carbon neutral before 2060. However, the impact of carbon quota auctions on renewable energy generation has not been sufficiently discussed. The main purpose of this study is to investigate whether China can rely on quota auctions to increase renewable energy generation in the short term, and to demonstrate which is more effective in promoting renewable energy development, policy enforcement or auction constraints? The improved neo-trans-log production model, the multi-objective linear programming model and the dispatch heuristic were used to predict additional emission reduction cost, optimized power mix with different auctioning rates, with economic development, technological progress and the unique characteristics of China's power generation industry being taken into consideration. The results show that the auctioning rate will have little influence on the optimized energy production structure, especially on the share of renewable energy resources; when the total on-grid electricity generation ranges from 7625 to 7926 billion kW h and the auctioning rate ranges from 0% to 5%, policy enforcement will influence the generation of renewable energy to a greater extent than auctioning in the near future.