The slowdown in GDP growth and the increase in coal consumption against the trend are the main reasons why China's energy intensity and carbon intensity have fallen less than expected.
▲In 2023, China's energy consumption will increase by 5.7% year-on-year, and its GDP will increase by 5.2%. Photo credit: Ng Han Guan / Alamy
Halfway through the 14th Five-Year Plan process, China's energy intensity and carbon intensity have fallen far short of expectations.
An assessment report released by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) late last year was the first to expose the problem, and recent statistics released by the National Bureau of Statistics confirm that the gap between the two indicators and the target is like a chasm.
A high-profile question is whether China will be able to meet its energy and carbon intensity targets set by the 14th Five-Year Plan in the remaining two years.
What is Energy Intensity?
Energy intensity is the amount of energy required to produce a unit of GDP. This indicator shows the relationship between a country's economic development and energy consumption, and the higher the energy intensity, the higher the dependence on energy for its economic growth.
There is little chance of achieving the goal
At the end of 2023, Zheng Shajie, director of the National Development and Reform Commission, reported to the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress on the mid-term assessment report on the implementation of the Outline of the 14th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development of the People's Republic of China and the Long-Range Objectives Through the Year 2035 (hereinafter referred to as the "Outline").
The 14th Five-Year Plan covers the period from 2021 to 2025, and the Outline, issued in March 2021, sets out clear binding provisions on 20 key indicators for economic and social development during this period. By 2025, energy intensity will need to be reduced by 13.5% compared to 2020, and carbon intensity will need to be reduced by 18%. This means that during the 14th Five-Year Plan period, energy intensity will need to decline by an average of 2.8% per year, while carbon intensity will need to decline by 3.9% per year.
According to the Statistical Communiqué of the People's Republic of China on National Economic and Social Development in 2023 recently released by the National Bureau of Statistics, energy intensity in 2023 decreased by 0.5% compared with 2022, while carbon intensity remained the same as the previous year.
Looking back at the previous Statistical Bulletin, Dialogue Earth sorted out the year-on-year changes of these two indicators in 2021 and 2022: in 2021, energy intensity decreased by 2.7% year-on-year and carbon intensity decreased by 3.8% year-on-year, and in 2022, energy intensity decreased by 0.1% year-on-year and carbon intensity decreased by 0.8% year-on-year.
Although Zheng Shajie's report did not give specific data on the progress of these two indicators, based on the data published in the Statistical Bulletin over the past three years, it can be estimated that by 2023, energy intensity will only be 3.3% lower than in 2020, and carbon intensity will only be 4.6% lower than in 2020. In other words, if the 14th Five-Year Plan is to be met on schedule, energy intensity will need to be reduced by 10.5% from 2023 levels over the next two years, and carbon intensity will need to be reduced by 14%.
"It is impossible to reduce energy intensity and carbon intensity so much in two years' time, and it is a certainty that the 14th Five-Year Plan will not meet its goals. Yang Fuqiang, a distinguished researcher at the Energy Research Institute of Peking University, told Dialogue Earth.
According to the just-released 2024 Government Work Report, the central government's energy intensity reduction target for this year is only 2.5%, and it is unlikely that this target will be achieved by the end of the 14th Five-Year Plan.
"There are too many debts in the early stage, and it is difficult to get back on the target track, so the target set for this year is 2.5%. It can only be said that in the next time, we will strive to return to the original track of achieving the goal as soon as possible. Yang Fuqiang said.
The crux of the problem: under the pressure of ensuring supply, the improvement of energy efficiency has slowed down
Zhou Dadi, a member of the National Climate Change Expert Advisory Committee, said in an interview with the first financial reporter that the main reasons for the unsatisfactory decline of the two indicators are two aspects: one is that the energy consumption per unit of GDP has increased when the economic growth rate has slowed down and the energy demand has maintained a high growth rate;
According to the 2023 Statistical Bulletin, China's total energy consumption increased by 5.7% year-on-year in the past year, while the annual GDP increased by only 5.2% compared to the previous year. This breaks the pattern in which China's economy has grown faster than its energy consumption for many years.
"Although the domestic service industry has been greatly affected by the previous epidemic and the growth rate of GDP has slowed down, the basic energy demand, especially the energy demand related to people's livelihood, has maintained a high growth rate, making the decline in energy intensity and carbon emission intensity less than ideal. Zhou Dadi said to the first financial network.
At the same time, coal consumption grew faster than GDP for the second year in a row. The last time this happened was 20 years ago, when energy consumption statistics first appeared in the statistical bulletins: from 2003 to 2005, coal consumption grew faster than GDP for three consecutive years.
At that time, China had just joined the WTO, the economy was in a state of take-off, and the strong demand for energy in all walks of life stimulated the price of coal to soar, and the "coal boss" was also in the limelight during this period.
However, unlike two decades ago, this time China's economy is facing multiple downward pressures, and coal consumption is growing against the trend, and the reasons for this are worth exploring.
"We're in the process of transformation, so GDP isn't growing fast. According to foreign experience, when GDP growth is in a downward phase, the growth of energy consumption will also decline. There are many problems with the fact that our energy consumption is growing faster than our GDP, and one of the main reasons is that not enough attention has been paid to improving energy efficiency. Yang Fuqiang said.
According to an analysis by the Climate Change and Energy Transition Project of the Institute of Energy Research at Peking University, the vast majority of the new coal consumption last year came from the power sector: the increase in thermal coal consumption accounted for more than 80% of the increase in coal consumption in the country, an increase of about 100 million tons of standard coal year-on-year.
In Yang's view, the "abnormality" of coal consumption in the past two years is inseparable from the government's excessive emphasis on energy supply and neglect to improve energy efficiency: "In the past three years, the turmoil in the international energy market caused by power rationing in Northeast China, the drought in Sichuan and the Russia-Ukraine conflict has made the country put energy supply in the first place. In order to speed up the recovery of production after the epidemic, it is also necessary to ensure that the energy supply can keep up. In this context, because the electricity price control has not been relaxed for so many years, and coal is very cheap, a large amount of thermal coal is used to generate electricity. ”
As a result of the introduction of cheap electricity, both businesses and individuals have become "unrestrained" in their use of electricity. "If the price of energy is very low, and the supply is guaranteed, then the economic benefits of energy conservation will be low, and there is not so much incentive for enterprises and individuals to do this thing. Yang Fuqiang said.
However, he also pointed out that since energy intensity and carbon intensity are binding targets, failure to meet them will inevitably attract the attention of the central leadership and relevant departments, and follow-up investigation and rectification will definitely be carried out. The 2024 Government Work Report has emphasized the need to "implement a comprehensive conservation strategy, accelerate energy-saving and water-saving transformation in key areas", and at the same time "promote the R&D and application of advanced energy-saving and carbon-reduction technologies, and accelerate the formation of a green and low-carbon supply chain".
"Carbon peaking" is expected to be brought forward
A noteworthy detail is that this year's statistical bulletin adds the qualifier "deducting raw material energy consumption and non-fossil energy consumption" before giving the reduction in energy intensity, which reveals two meanings: first, if renewable energy is included in the total energy consumption statistics, then the actual energy intensity will be higher than the figure released by the Bureau of Statistics, which explains the "contradiction" in the 2023 statistical bulletin, China's energy consumption growth rate is higher than GDP growth rate, but energy intensity is declining; Second, as the proportion of renewable energy in China's energy structure can no longer be ignored, China is shifting from the previous "dual control of energy consumption" to "dual control of carbon emissions", and the consumption of fossil energy and renewable energy will be counted separately, which will provide more space for the growth of renewable energy.
Although coal consumption still accounts for 55.3% of China's total energy consumption in 2023, this figure is declining year by year. With the explosive growth of clean energy installations such as photovoltaic and wind power in the past five years, the proportion of clean energy consumption in total energy consumption has also increased from 23.3% in 2019 to 26.4% in 2023, and this momentum will continue in the foreseeable future.
And because coal production and consumption have grown "exceptionally fast" over the past two years, Yang Fuqiang believes that "carbon peaking" may even come earlier. He pointed out that the central government has not given up on controlling coal, but has proposed to "strictly and reasonably control the total amount of coal consumption", and that the coal power boom of the past two years has actually overdrawn the growth space brought by power supply in advance. "In the future, the number of new coal-fired power installations will decline significantly, and in the next two to three years, China will most likely achieve the goal of peaking carbon emissions before 2030. "And the energy consumption plan we have now developed is enough to ensure economic growth, except for a few energy-intensive industries, such as coal chemical and petrochemical are still growing, most other energy-intensive industries have reached the peak of production." ”
However, he also cautioned that since there is no hard quantitative target for "carbon peaking", if more stringent coal control measures are not taken, power market reforms are not taken, and supply and demand management in the energy market are strengthened, the actual peak may be relatively high and the duration may be relatively long, bringing pressure to achieve "carbon neutrality" in the next stage.
This article was first published on the Dialogue Earth website.
■ Xia Zhijian is the Chinese editor of Dialogue Earth. He joined in 2022 and is currently based in London. Prior to that, he covered environmental and scientific issues in two of China's leading media outlets, both of which are also areas of interest. He holds a master's degree in environmental science from Beijing Normal University.
文章来源：Dialogue Earth