Large-scale renewable energy brings regionally disproportional air quality and health co-benefits in China

Yang Xie; Meng Xu; Jinlu Pu; Yujie Pan; Xiaorui Liu; Yanxu Zhang; Shasha Xu

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2023.107459

Large-scale renewable energy brings regionally disproportional air quality and health co-benefits in China

iScience. 2023 Jul 23;26(8):107459. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.107459. eCollection 2023 Aug 18.

Authors

Yang Xie^{1

2}, Meng Xu³, Jinlu Pu¹, Yujie Pan⁴, Xiaorui Liu⁴, Yanxu Zhang⁵, Shasha Xu⁴

Affiliations

¹ School of Economics and Management, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China.
² Laboratory for Low-carbon Intelligent Governance, Beihang University, Beijing 100191, China.
³ School of Management, Wuhan Institute of Technology, Wuhan 430205, China.
⁴ College of Environmental Science and Engineering, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
⁵ School of Atmospheric Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing, Jiangsu 210023, China.

Abstract

Developing renewable energy could jointly reduce air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and bring air pollution-related health co-benefits. However, the temporal and sub-national distributions of investment costs and human health co-benefits from renewable energy deployment remain unclear. To investigate this gap, we linked multiple models for a more comprehensive assessment of the economic-environmental-health co-benefits of renewable energy development in China. The results show that developing renewable energy can avoid 0.6 million premature mortalities, 151 million morbidities, and 111 million work-loss days in 2050. Meanwhile, the human health and economic co-benefits vary substantially across regions in China. Renewable energy can undoubtedly bring health and economic co-benefits. Nevertheless, the economic benefits lag considerably behind the high initial investment cost, first negative in 2030 (-0.6 trillion Yuan) and then positive in 2050 (2.9 trillion Yuan). Hence, renewable energy deployment strategy must be carefully designed considering the regional disparities.

Keywords: Interdisciplinary application studies; Sociology.