Empowering resilience of urban energy system in China: How does digital economy matter?

Empowering energy security with the digital economy is a vital national strategic initiative, and it is urgent to explore whether China’s urban energy system can leverage the opportunities of the digital economy to enhance its resilience. We, thus, take 286 cities as research objects, construct an energy system resilience (ESR) index system from three dimensions of robustness, recoverability, and adaptability, and gauge the urban ESR from 2010 to 2019. On this basis, this article quantitatively discusses the actual effect and heterogeneity of the digital economy on urban ESR. We find: (1) the ESR values of 286 cities show a stable situation followed by an obvious increase and a sharp decline from 2010 to 2019, and cities with higher and lower ESR levels are located in the northeast and southwest China, respectively; (2) the current development of the digital economy cannot stimulate and empower urban ESR enhancement, which stems from the negative impacts of the digital economy on energy productivity and industrial upgrading; and (3) the negative digitization-ESR nexus is mainly manifested in the midwestern cities, middle- and small-scale cities, non-provincial capitals, and the middle Yangtze River and Chongqing-Chengdu cities. This study, consequently, proposes some targeted policy implications.