IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/aen/journl/ej41-3-davidson.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Avoiding Pitfalls in China's Electricity Sector Reforms

Author

Listed:
  • Michael R. Davidson and Ignacio Pérez-Arriaga

Abstract

China has recently reinvigorated reforms to its electricity sector, focusing on increasing the role of markets and improving regulation. While restructuring an electricity sector is difficult and can require years of detailed planning, China's approach relies upon broad central guidelines with many details and initiatives left to provincial governments. We assess the current state of reform efforts through the lens of five "pitfalls" based on well-established regulatory economics literature and international lessons, focusing on contract structure, system operation, and regulation. We find that while market efforts are likely to achieve efficiency gains with respect to the planned system, they may fall short of crucial functions of a market, such as incentivizing flexibility given increasing renewable energy penetrations. Making markets work will likely require a stronger centralization of market design and regulatory oversight authorities.

Suggested Citation

  • Michael R. Davidson and Ignacio Pérez-Arriaga, 2020. "Avoiding Pitfalls in China's Electricity Sector Reforms," The Energy Journal, International Association for Energy Economics, vol. 0(Number 3), pages 119-142.
  • Handle: RePEc:aen:journl:ej41-3-davidson
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.iaee.org/en/publications/ejarticle.aspx?id=3504
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to IAEE members and subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Fatras, Nicolas & Ma, Zheng & Duan, Hongbo & Jørgensen, Bo Nørregaard, 2022. "A systematic review of electricity market liberalisation and its alignment with industrial consumer participation: A comparison between the Nordics and China," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 167(C).
    2. Liu, Y. & Jiang, Z. & Guo, B., 2021. "Assessing China's Provincial Electricity Spot Market Pilot Operations: Lessons from the Guangdong Province," Cambridge Working Papers in Economics 2165, Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge.
    3. Wang, Pengyu & Fang, Debin & Wang, Shuyi, 2022. "Optimal dynamic regulation in retail electricity market with consumer feedback and social learning," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 168(C).
    4. Liu, Yang & Jiang, Zhigao & Guo, Bowei, 2022. "Assessing China’s provincial electricity spot market pilot operations: Lessons from Guangdong province," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 164(C).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • F0 - International Economics - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aen:journl:ej41-3-davidson. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: David Williams (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/iaeeeea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.