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Assessing the mitigation effect on greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction of the National VI Emissions Standard bears great significance in enhanced actions on climate change in China. This research established a reference scenario and National VI scenario to evaluate whether the National VI Emissions Standard could make a contribution to synergistic emission reduction. Here are the main conclusions: carbon dioxide (CO

On 1 June 2017, the US President Donald Trump officially announced the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, thus the study on the reasons of withdrawal, the potential impacts, and coping strategies has become a focus among policy circles and of the international community. Based on the self-developed US Policy Assessment Model, this paper systematically evaluates the three potential “major deficits” in terms of mitigation, climate finance, and global climate governance, as a result of the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and puts forward policy suggestions for coping with such transformations accordingly. The study shows that the United States ’withdrawal from the Paris Agreement will affect the existence and implementation of successive climate policies and result in an additional 8.8–13.4% increase in the global emissions reduction deficit. The United States’ withdrawal will also deteriorate the existing climate finance mechanism. The Green Climate Fund (GCF)’s funding gap will increase by...

This paper explores the impact of international emissions trading (IET) among Korea, China, and Japan, three countries that would form the largest potential carbon market in the world. The Nationally Determined Contribution for each country forms the basis of scenario analyses using GCAM (Global Change Assessment Model). As expected, China emerges as the sole net seller of emissions permits while Korea and Japan are the net purchasers of emission permits produced by China. All participants enjoy gains from emissions trading. The implementation of IET changes the power systems of Korea and Japan by favoring increased conventional fossil fuel usage over renewable power technologies or attached carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies, while China’s power system moves in the opposite direction, by boosting the deployment of renewables and CCS-attached technologies. Considering the counterproductive incentives for Korea and Japan to consume more carbon-intensive energy sources, each country should consider such issues carefully before officially adopting IET as the pillar of climate policy.

Photovoltaic (PV) power has a huge resource of supply, wide range of usage, and low impact on environment and it is considered as a key factor of the supply mix in the future for China. PV power is still in its infancy in China. It has higher cost than coal-fired power, and needs policy support. In recent years, China has launched a series of policies to stimulate PV power. These policies, however, are temporal, mainly because the total additional investment to make PV power grid parity is uncertain. After a brief review on current status of PV power development in China, this paper applies learning curve theory to study the cost reduction trends of polycrystalline silicon PV cells - main components of large-scale PV (LS-PV) power generation, then sets different scenarios to estimate time and the total learning cost of PV power’s grid parity. MESSAGE model is also applied to make a comparable estimation of the future PV installation in China. The results show that long-term subsidy policy for PV power is feasible in China with the rising cost of coal-fired power, but aggressive subsidy policy is not very efficient.

The paper highlights the energy dilemma in China’s modernization process. It explores the technological and policy options for the transition to a sustainable energy system in China with Tsinghua University’s Low Carbon Energy Model (LCEM). China has already taken intensive efforts to promote research, development, demonstration and commercialization of sustainable energy technologies over the past five year. The policy actions cover binding energy conservation and environmental pollution control targets, economic incentives for sustainable energy, and public R&D supports. In order to achieve the sustainable energy system transformation eventually, however, China needs to take further actions such as strengthening R&D of radically innovative sustainable energy technologies and systems such as poly-generation, enhancing the domestic manufacturing capacity of sustainable energy technologies and systems, creating stronger economic incentives for research, development, demonstration and commercialization of sustainable energy technologies, and playing a leading role in international technology collaborations.

This chapter discusses the low-carbon electricity development in China, and its opportunities and challenges. China's role in an international climate-change solution cannot be overstated. Now the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases, China has become the focus of scrutiny as climate-related impacts are revealed and global policy solutions are debated. At the center of this scrutiny is China's rapidly growing power sector: the largest single source of carbon dioxide emissions in the world. Coal has played and continues to play a crucial role in powering China's economic development, particularly for electricity generation. Diversification away from coal and toward a range of low-carbon power sources will need to be at the core of any climate-change mitigation strategy that moves China to a lower-carbon development pathway. The power sector is at the core of China's climate-change challenge. A complex multidimensional universe comprising many actors and competing forces, China's power sector is expanding at a massive scale, with momentum driving it toward a coal-based future.