DEVELOPMENT POTENTIAL PREDICTION AND POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS OF NEW ENERGY IN CHINA

Facing a rapid growing energy consumption and ever-increasing environmental pollution, new energy consumption is a key lever to achieve more sustainable development. In China, the government is implementing a wide range of policies to support its development. China’s new energy experienced a rapid growth over the past two decades, causing great concerns over the future development potential prediction. However, previous works always apply the single forecasting method, which is limited by the accuracy of the predict result. In view of this, this paper first presents the history information on China’s new energy by total consumption and fuel types (solar, wind, hydropower, nuclear, geothermal and biomass). Then, by combining the GM (1, 1) grey model with BP neural network model and establishing a combined Grey-BP modelling tool, future the development potential of China’s new energy is forecasted. In addition, the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method is performed to rank different new energy fuel types, from both the development scale and growth rate perspective. According to our estimation, China’s total new energy consumption will increase from 363.9 Mtoe in 2015 to 690.5 Mtoe in 2020, accounting for 19.7% of the domestic energy need. Besides, according to the rank results, nuclear and solar energy will be considered as future oriented composition of the new energy, as well as hydropower considered as the key element in China. At last, this paper suggests that future Chinese government must incorporate the consideration of the development potential of the new energy into the existing energy policies, and some policy recommendations are proposed to promote the sustainable development of China's new energy from the government, region and enterprise perspective, respectively.