Mapping the Energy Flow from Supply to End Use in three Geographic Regions of China
Abstract
China's past economic development policies resulted in different energy infrastructure patterns across China. There is a long tradition in analysing and discussing regional disparities of China's economy. For more than 20 years, regional differences in GDP, industrial outputs, household income and consumption were analysed across China's provincial units. Regional disparities in China's current energy flow are rarely visualised and quantified from a comprehensive, system-wide perspective that is tracing all major fuels and energy carriers in supply, transformation and final end-use in different sectors. A few national and provincial energy flow diagrams of China were developed since 2000, althoug with limited detail on major regional disparities and inter-regional fuel flows. No regional energy flow charts are yet available for East-, Central- and West-China. This study maps and quantifies energy supply, transformation and end-use for East-, Central- and West-China in 2010 using Sankey diagrams. The regional energy flow diagrams introduced in this study will help to make regional characteristics in China's energy system easier to understand and to analyse for a broad audience, including economists, engineers, infrastructure planners, policy makers, and other non-technical experts. The future development of China's energy infrastructure, interlinked with regional economic development planning, needs to account for various regional differences: (i) in the locations of traditional and renewable energy resources, (ii) in the coverage of existing energy transmission networks and pipelines, (iii) in the location of major load centers, and (vi) in energy trade links with neighboring countries.
Info
Conference Paper, 2014
UN SDG Classification
DK Main Research Area
Science/Technology
