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China states to build new power system dominated by new energy power to promote the targets for peaking carbon emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. Peaking regulation ancillary services provided by coal-fired power units is an essential solution to mitigate the volatility and instability of large-scale renewable energy for China's specific power mix. However, when the coal-fired power units operate at a low power output, the intensity of both coal consumption and carbon emissions gradually rises with the falling output rate. Moreover, cutting down the power output of coal-fired units frequently will damage the technical life. Given the impacts of power market reform and carbon mitigation targets, whether to participate in the energy market or the peaking regulation ancillary service market is an urgent issue for coal-fired power units. Considering the discrepancy in costs and benefits of various units at different output rate, this paper proposes a multi-objective optimization model to solve the issue from the perspective of the coal-fired power generators, in which both economic profit and carbon reduction goals are coordinated. Sequential quadratic programming is adopted to solve the nonlinear optimization problem. In order to study the difference in the decisions made by varied technical units, 7 different types of units are analyzed in the case study. The scenarios analysis indicates that large-capacity and new coal-fired power units are better to participate in energy market since it can give full play to the advantage of higher generation efficiency, while the small-capacity ones are suitable to provide flexible service in the peaking regulation ancillary service market. Besides, simple low-carbon objective will burden the cost of coal-fired power units and challenge the sustainable transition of power system. Hence, the power system should balance both economic profit of generators and national carbon mitigation targets during the low-carbon transition., (© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Replacing conventional fossil fuel power plants with large-scale renewable energy sources (RES) is a crucial aspect of the decarbonization of the power sector and represents a key part of the carbon-neutral strategy of China. The high penetration rate of renewable energy in the electricity system, however, implies the challenges of dealing with the intermittency and fluctuation of RES. Power to gas (P2G), which can convert surplus renewable power into a chemical form of energy (i.e., synthetic gas), can help handle this challenge and supply new energy carriers for various energy sectors. By modeling three potential 2060 energy mix scenarios in China, this paper aims to describe the possible contribution of the high penetration rate of renewable energy combined with P2G in the future sustainable energy system. Different schemes are listed and compared, and the results are used in a basic economic evaluation of the synthetic gas production cost for the P2G plants. Ideally, nearly 18 million tons of carbon dioxide would be recycled and transformed into methane (around 9.37 km 3 ) annually in China. Considering a zero price for the excess renewable power and future costs of the components, the levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of the final production of methane is estimated at 0.86 $/m 3 SNG ., (© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Due to the significant changes of economic growth rate, energy structure, and energy efficiency in China, whether energy policies should be adjusted is worthy of attention. This paper employs ARDL-ECM and Toda-Yamamoto causality to investigate the relationship between renewable energy, non-renewable energy, carbon emissions, economic growth, gross fixed capital formation, and urban population spanning the period 1960-2019 in China. The examined results of ARDL-ECM indicate that renewable energy both have positive impact on GDP in the short term and long term but non-renewable energy only have positive impact on GDP in the short term. Additionally, based on Toda-Yamamoto causality, this paper finds a unidirectional Granger causality running from economic growth to energy consumption and from energy consumption to carbon emissions. And there is a unidirectional Granger causality running from GDP to non-renewable energy consumption. It is worth noting that renewable energy consumption and economic growth have positive bidirectional influence on each other. The study findings suggest that stricter energy conservation and pollution emission reduction policy should be implemented and renewable energy should be applied on a larger scale in order to achieve the goal of sustainable economic development., (© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

China is the largest carbon dioxide emitter in the world. Over the past decades, China has made great efforts to retard the carbon emission growth. This paper aims to quantify the driving forces of stagewise provincial carbon emission changes and expound the bottom-up provincial efforts aligned with China's carbon abatement targets. During 2007-2012, economic growth as the major contributing factor posed a great increase in provincial carbon emissions, especially in underdeveloped provinces such as Inner Mongolia, Anhui, Guangxi, Shaanxi, and Ningxia. During 2012-2017, the energy intensity effect replaced economic growth as the largest contributor to provincial carbon emission changes. In both two periods, industrial structure upgrading and renewable energy expansion are conducive to mitigate provincial carbon growth, and the power sector will continue to contribute to national decarbonization. Lastly, this paper provides insight into national and provincial carbon emission abatement.

The developing countries and emerging economies are crucially contributing to global economic development, energy transition, and climate governance. This paper employs panel cointegration technique to investigate the long-run relationship between carbon emissions and five impacting factors (per capita GDP, primary energy consumption, international trade, fossil proportion, and quadratic per capita GDP) in 50 representative developing countries during 1995-2017. The empirical findings confirm the existence of long-run equilibrium, and the regressing coefficients of fully-modified OLS (FMOLS) indicate that (a) impacting features of the inverted U-shaped curve of Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) theory appear in a few countries, such as Mexico, Croatia, Kazakhstan, Iran, Algeria, Indonesia, and Thailand; (b) the energy consumption has statistically positive and significant impacts on boosting the carbon emissions; (c) the negative effect of international trade emerges in the developing nations enjoying trade surpluses; and (d) fossil energy share poses a mixed impact. This paper reveals that the vast and inspiring contribution of developing countries to global carbon emission reduction should attract more international attention and assistance.

The scope of this study is to analyze the carbon emissions intensity of electricity generation in "Belt and Road Initiative" (BRI) countries. The total CO 2 emissions from electricity generation in BRI nations increases from 4232.34 Mt in 2013 to 4402.38 Mt in 2015, accounting for 34.45% of global CO 2 emissions from electricity generation. Logarithmic mean Divisia index methodology is applied to analyze the drivers of carbon emissions intensity in BRI nations. The decomposition results revealed that the regional carbon emissions intensity in BRI nations increases during 2013-2015 and the power generation efficiency is the essential factor to improve carbon emissions performance in BRI developing countries. For BRI developing countries, promoting clean and efficient thermal power is a pragmatic priority for green power development.