Energy Use in China: Sectoral Trends and Future Outlook

Abstract

The past decade has seen the development of many scenarios describing long-term patterns of future Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions. Each new approach adds additional insights to our understanding of overall future energy trends. In most of these models, however, a description of sectoral activity variables is missing. End-use sector-level results for buildings, industry, or transportation or analysis of adoption of particular technologies and policies are not provided in global energy modeling efforts.

All major analyses of long-term impacts of greenhouse gas emissions to date rely on scenarios of energy supply and demand. The underlying drivers of all such major scenarios are macro socioeconomic variables (GDP, population,) combined with storylines describing the context of economic and social development. Unfortunately, these scenarios do not provide more detail than the sector level (i.e., buildings, industry, and transportation). This is to say that the scenarios are developed without reference to the saturation, efficiency, or usage of air conditioners, for example. For energy analysts and policymakers, this is a serious omission, calling into question the very meaning of the scenarios. Energy consumption is driven by the diffusion of various types of equipment; the performance, saturation, and utilization of the equipment has a profound effect on energy demand. Policy analysts wishing to assess the impacts of efficiency or other mitigation policies require more detailed description of drivers and end use breakdown.

Based on these considerations and EETD’s extensive expertise in energy demand, the goal of this project is to build a new generation global energy and CO2 emissions model that will be based on the level of diffusion of end use technologies. The model will address end-use energy demand characteristics including sectoral patterns of energy consumption, trends in saturation and usage of energy-using equipment, technological change including efficiency improvements, and links between urbanization and energy demand.

To this end, LBNL has initiated the Global Energy Demand Collaborative to initiate the development of a new generation model. The ultimate goal of the GEDC is a complete modeling system that covers the entire world (by region or country), and covers all economic sectors at the end use level. In the short and medium term, the core GEDC team has performed a series of studies such as: country studies, sector studies, or methodology reports. The first of these reports include:

• Sectoral Trends in Global Energy Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions
• Energy Use in India: Sector Trends and Future Outlook (forthcoming)
• What do India’s transport energy data tell us?
• Residential Electricity in India and What can be done about it

The present report draws upon the expertise developed over many years in the Laboratory’s China Energy Group in order to present as complete and detailed picture as possible of the components and trends in energy consumption in the world’s largest country.