Search Results (3)

Addressing the sustainability challenges posed by the expanding livestock sector is crucial for China’s green transition. With the transformation of national dietary structure and increasing demand for livestock products, the associated resource consumption and environmental impacts, particularly carbon emissions have intensified. Reducing carbon emissions from livestock is vital for mitigating global warming, enhancing resource utilization efficiency, improving ecosystems and biodiversity, and ultimately achieving sustainable development of the livestock industry. Against this backdrop, this study measures the carbon emissions from livestock sector employing the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method, and applies the Generalized Divisia Index Method (GDIM) to analyze the factors affecting the changes in carbon emissions, aiming to quantify and analyze the carbon footprint of China’s livestock sector to inform sustainable practices. The findings reveal that China’s total carbon emissions from the livestock sector fluctuated between 645.15 million tons and 812.99 million tons from 2000 to 2023. Since 2020, emissions have entered a new phase of continuous growth, with a 5.40% increase in 2023 compared to 2020. Significantly, a positive trend toward sustainability is observed in the substantial decline of carbon emission intensity over the study period, with notable reductions in emission intensity across provinces and a gradual convergence in inter-provincial disparities. Understanding the drivers is key for effective mitigation. The output level and total mechanical power consumption level emerged as primary positive drivers of carbon emissions, while output carbon intensity and mechanical power consumption carbon intensity served as major negative drivers. Moving forward, to foster a sustainable and low-carbon livestock sector, China’s livestock sector development should prioritize coordinated carbon reduction across the entire industrial chain, adjust the industrial structure, and enhance the utilization efficiency of advanced low-carbon agricultural machinery while introducing such equipment. Full article

The utilization of solar power generation/storage microgrid systems has become an important approach, transforming the energy structure of China in order to achieve the emission peak and carbon neutrality. Meanwhile, the commercialization of household photovoltaic (PV) systems is also at the transitional period between its beginning to its maturity. This study considers developers intending to invest in building community microgrids with the concept of sustainable development, and focuses on the relationship between the developers and residential users. Firstly, an operation framework considering the autonomous behavior patterns of stakeholders is proposed. Then, a two-level mathematical programming model based on the leader–follower game is established in this paper. In the upper level, the developer decides the capacity size and the system price of the microgrid system in order to maximize profit. In the lower level, the residential users in the community optimize their power consumption behaviors in the microgrid system taking into account both benefit and fairness. They need to decide whether to support the construction of a microgrid system by comparing their electricity bills before and after participating in a microgrid system. Through solving the model and analyzing the relationship between the two sides of the game, it can be seen that only by designing the optimal system configuration and coordinating with weather conditions in terms of better sunshine intensity can the developer and all kinds of users benefit from the project under the current market data. Meanwhile, the users with higher power consumption benefit more from the microgrid system among different types of residents. Under the market structure dominated by developer, the government’s PV subsidy will greatly increase the revenue of system developer. However, it does not increase the installed capacity of system, nor does it bring more benefits to residential users. Moreover, compared with the independent operation mode, the centralized management mode can bring more benefits to both sides and encourage the developer to build larger installations. Full article

Under the concept of green development, coal and oil control policies were frequently introduced, but the “cold” thinking under the “hot” environment is more conducive to the smooth promotion of the “transitional period” of China’s power-structure transformation. How to better consider production efficiency and environmental benefits is the theme that thermal power enterprises need to constantly break through. The most feasible “transitional period” path for thermal power enterprises is improving the efficiency of energy saving, reducing emissions, and simultaneously ensuring benefits and social awareness. This paper selected 17 listed companies in China’s thermal power sector, combined with their input resources, output, and other indicators, using a slacks-based measure–data envelopment analysis (SBM–DEA) model with undesirable outputs, and comprehensively analyzed the relationship among the technical efficiency improvement and the industry status, including price earnings ratio (P/E ratio) in the recent two years. The results show that the improvement of energy efficiency can indeed optimize enterprises’ operations and improve P/E ratio. Although clean-energy power generation has better environmental benefits, it is still lacking in efficiency; therefore, the balance between efficiency and environment sustainability should concern us. Full article