BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 X-WR-CALNAME;VALUE=TEXT:Progress in China’s electricity market reform and assessing its impact on generation efficiency PRODID:-//Harvard events data//EN BEGIN:VEVENT UID:event_1556506_0 SUMMARY:Progress in China’s electricity market reform and assessing its impact on generation efficiency DESCRIPTION:

A Harvard-China Project Research Seminar with Feng Song, Associate Professor, Renmin University of China and Harvard-China Project Visiting Scholar

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Abstract: Improving efficiency is often an important motivation to promote market reform. While China’s electricity sector, which has the world largest generation capacity and carbon emission, is transitioning from a planning mechanism to a market mechanism, the rigid ex post empirical analysis of its impact is still very limited. Using a unique dataset of coal-fired units from five southern provinces in China, we conducted a difference-in-difference analysis to estimate the impact of market reform on production efficiency of the coal generation. We find that market reform improves its overall production efficiency mainly through the inter-unit reallocation, e.g. reallocating production from high-cost units to low-cost units. The production from the low-cost units increased by 23.8-30.5% during the sample period. The intra-unit efficiency, measured by coal-intensity and self-utilization rates, was also improved. Applying the estimation results to construct a counterfactual market reform scenario, we simulate that the generation cost of coal-fired power could be saved by 2.44% and carbon emissions could be reduced by 2.37% during the study period. The decomposition results show that the inter-units reallocation contributes 46.10% to cost savings and 39.81% to emission reduction, respectively. The intra-fuel efficiency improvement contributes 44.69% to cost saving and 40.85% to emission reduction, respectively.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Song is a professor at Renmin University of China. Her research focuses on China’s energy economics and policy. Her current research projects include renewable energy development, energy sector reform and carbon neutrality in China. Before she joined Renmin University, she graduated from Michigan State University with a Ph.D in Environmental and Resource Economics. She has published papers in American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Nature Energy, Energy Economics and Land Economics.

Sponsored by Harvard-China Project, Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

LOCATION:Pierce Hall Room 100F, 29 Oxford Street, Cambridge STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20240131T200000Z DTEND:20240131T210000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR