Elasticity of substitution between clean energy and non-clean energy: Evidence from the Chinese electricity industry

At present, China is in a stage of high-quality economic development. Rising demand for electricity has created a lot of CO₂ emissions, which has put great pressure on the low-carbon development of China's power industry. Therefore, China attaches great importance to the potential of various clean power generation to replace thermal power generation. Given this, the study examines the potential for substitution of non-clean energy generation (thermal power generation) and clean energy generation (hydropower, nuclear power generation, and other energy generation) from 1993 to 2022 by using the translog production function and provides a scenario analysis of energy substitution for power generation. Firstly, the k-fold cross-validation method is used for ridge regression estimation in this paper, which avoids the subjective bias caused by the ridge trace diagram method used in most of the previous literatures. Secondly, compared with the previous research on the substitution elasticity of the power sector, this paper subdivides the types of clean power energy when estimating the substitution elasticity, which can better analyze the substitution relationship between thermal power and various clean power. Finally, the estimated substitution elasticity of thermal power and various clean energy sources is greater than 1, which indicates that clean energy generation can effectively replace non-clean energy generation. This provides an effective substitution elasticity parameter for the power sector to study low-carbon development. The scenario analysis show China's power sector can increase the proportion of clean power generation to reduce the carbon emission intensity while ensure power supply, which can help the Chinese government adjust the implementation of policies to promote the early peak of carbon emissions and keep carbon emission at a low level in the power sector.