Detecting and Understanding Synergies and Co-Benefits of Low Carbon Development in the Electric Power Industry in China

China’s electric power industry contributes a significant amount of carbon emissions as well as air pollutants such as SO₂, NO_x, and fine particles. In order to detect co-benefits of carbon reduction and air pollution control, this study analyzed the emission reduction, emission reduction factors, and synergistic effect factors of technical and structural emission reduction measures in the electric power industry in the Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Yunnan provinces and Shanghai City. The main findings are: (1) the structural emission reduction measures in all four regions had positive co-control effects. Therefore, promoting renewables can achieve remarkable co-benefits; (2) the result demonstrated that the direct removal ability of pollutants by technical emission reduction measures was better than the structural emission reduction measures in all four case studies. However, there were no or few carbon reduction co-benefits associated with their utilization; (3) in all cases, CO₂ had the highest emission factor value, which means that there is still room for synergistic carbon reduction; (4) air pollutants and CO₂ emission intensity from the Yunnan power plants were much higher than that of the other three regions. In order to achieve the overall co-benefits, co-control measures should be promoted and strengthened in western areas such as Yunnan.