Assessment of the degree of order in the organisational structure of electricity regulatory institution in China based on shannon entropy

An assessment model is built to investigate the degree of order in the organisational structure of the electricity regulatory institution (ERI) in China. The model is based on Shannon entropy and is constructed from the perspective of timeliness and accuracy of the flow of information. The model is then used to evaluate the degree of order in the organisational structures of the ERI during three stages of reform that occurred during 2002–13. The results indicate that the reforms and improvements made in the organisational structure of China's ERI have resulted in a stepwise increase in their degree of order (corresponding to 0.3156, 0.3277, and 0.3324 in the three stages, respectively). On this basis, a scheme is put forward to optimise the degree of order in the structure of the energy regulatory institution in the current stage. The results show that downsizing the internal and subordinate departments appropriately and creating more governmental agencies to regulate energy are conducive to further improving the degree of order of the energy regulatory institution. Finally, we use principal component analysis to propose a priority scheme for adding more regulatory governmental agencies based on sorted energy production and consumption data.