Assessing the influence of energy transition on economic-social growth: the case of China

In recent years, because of the one-sided interpretation of the nexus between the green & low-carbon energy transition and the high-quality economic-social growth, some over-idealized due-oriented judgments have led to failures in theories or deviations from practices. It is necessary and typical to select the panel data of 30 provinces in China from 2010 to 2020 to demonstrate that nexus, since China plays a different role in both climate change and global energy security. This paper defines and measures both the high-quality economic-social growth and the green & low-carbon energy transition efficiency. After analyzing the structure characteristics of energy transition, it also discusses the impact of the transition efficiency on the high-quality growth. The results indicate that the inflection point from quantitative to qualitative change in the regional high-quality growth has not yet arrived, while the developed regions and the developing regions are still grappling with pronounced problems of imbalance and insufficiency. As far as now, the energy transition efficiency in the energy resource centers is much higher than that in the energy load centers. The provinces with a characteristic of energy supply-demand equilibrium have seamlessly shifted from the Introduction stage of green & low-carbon development to the Growth stage. Both the decrease in energy intensity and the increase in renewable share are able to promote high-quality economic-social development obviously; however, the reduction of per capita carbon emission cannot yield the expected positive externality in a short run.