Designing incentives and penalties for China's renewable portfolio standards: A survey-based evolutionary game approach

China's Renewable Portfolio Standards, which is known as the Renewable Power Consumption Guarantee Mechanism, is the core consumption policy for renewable power in China, but the lack of penalty and incentive measures in the current regulations may not be an effective constraint on a power system with high proportion of renewable power under the Dual Carbon Goal. We analyzed the current policy and proposed integratable penalty and incentive measures and carry out a questionnaire survey on the entities that need to comply with the policy to learn about the acceptance of the proposed measures. Subsequently, an evolutionary game model involving the government, power sellers and power purchasers was constructed to simulate different combinations of penalty and incentive measures. The results show that a reasonable policy bundle should include strict penalties and attractive incentives, such as suspending business licenses and offering favourable credit services. Finally reasonable measures are selected, and policy implementations were provided for the optimization of the policy Renewable Power Consumption Guarantee Mechanism.