Impacts of heat metering and efficiency retrofit policy on residential energy consumption in China.

China's 11th Five-Year Plan introduced various policy instruments to address carbon mitigation; however, the ex-post-policy impacts need to be investigated in a scientific and systematic way to guide future policy design. In this paper, we estimate the impacts of the heat metering and energy efficiency retrofitting policy (HMEER) on residential energy consumption in Chinese provinces using a difference-in-differences approach. Our results suggest that the HMEER policy reduces energy consumption in the treated regions by 10% per year on average, with an annual reduction in CO2 of approximately 50 Mt. We conclude that the HMEER policy contributes to household energy conservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]