The promotion strategies of heat metering and charging in China’s heating region based on complex network evolutionary game model

Heat metering and charging can help raise residents’ awareness of energy conservation and save heat consumption in buildings. The heat metering and charging in China, however, was promoted insignificantly. To explore the behavior mechanism of heat-supply enterprises implementing heat metering and charging under the background of complex network in China’s heating region, and put forward the promotion strategies of heat metering and charging, this paper uses the heat-supply enterprises as the sample, improves the utility function of heat-supply enterprises by considering their difference aversion preference and altruistic preference at the same time based on the Difference Averse Surplus Maximizer Model. Then, we establish a complex network evolutionary game model among different heat-supply enterprises, and an empirical analysis is conducted to examine the impact of different factor on heat-supply enterprises in China’s heating region to implement heat metering and charging. The conclusions are as follows: (1) With the current heating cost and income, even if the government subsidizes all environmental benefit generated by heat metering and charging to heat-supply enterprises, the heat metering and charging could not be promoted in different scales of networks. (2) Increasing metering heat price, government fine, environmental protection tax and carbon emission trading price have positive effects on the promotion of heat metering and charging in different scales of networks. (3) The value of metering heat price, government fine, environmental protection tax and carbon emission trading price have no significant impacts on the evolutionary speeds of different scales of networks.