Abstract
The rise of China since World War II has been centralized in the form of a series of five-year plans. These plans affected society at all levels and have now reached a zenith in terms of ecological, environmental, energy, and economic outcomes. A new power law was enacted to govern the Chinese Electricity sector. The central government intent is to decentralize energy generation, transmission, and storage through the formulation of policies which affect energy generation through tighter supervisory controls, through innovation and economic rebates and aid. These new provisions are targeted to slow down the rate of energy consumption and enable the transition of China to an electricity generator based on renewables including hydroelectric, biomass natural gas, and nuclear with a lesser reliance on coal-fired electricity generation. The policies are derived from earlier noticed in area of electricity generation, transmission, and environmental protection. The formulated policies using southern China as a test case migrated from general pronouncements to specific policy outcomes; the acceptance of which is based on the level of gain, fairness, and transparency. Heavy electricity users can buy directly from the power generator competitive rates; however, the social justice principle ensures that users who do not choose to participate in the electricity market are quoted prices that are not at far higher levels than high volume users. Also, there needs to be tighter integration between the supply and return of investment or rebates either at the government or province-level to ensure transparency and fairness to supply. To meet the ambitious targets of decarbonization and environmental goal’s, the policymakers have allowed the local municipalities meet the projected targets using local knowledge, expertise, and resources; however, more research and development (R&D), technical assistance, and workforce training are required to meet the new policies scenario by 2040.
Author Contribution
G. Yongjun did all the internal data analyses from NEA, NRDC, and the five-year plans, including select figures; J. Liu translated some documents in English and completed the additional figures; and S. Bashir wrote the English draft and incorporated IEA, CAIT, non-China-based data sets. All authors reviewed the manuscript, which was submitted by J. Liu.
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Acknowledgments
This work is supported by the Petroleum Research Fund of the American Chemical Society (53827-UR10) and the Robert Welch Foundation (AC-0006). We thank the program chairs of the ENFL and COLL divisions of the America Chemical Society for the opportunity to run or moderate symposia at the technical sessions. Lastly Springer Science+Business Media, LLC technical staff are acknowledged for their assistance in copy editing this and other book chapters.
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Gao, Y., Zhang, Y., Liu, J.L., Bashir, S. (2019). Postface: China in the New Policies Scenario. In: Atesin, T.A., Bashir, S., Liu, J.L. (eds) Nanostructured Materials for Next-Generation Energy Storage and Conversion. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-59594-7_17
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