Empirical Study On The Productivity Of Thermal Power

The electric power industry being the bottleneck industry of the national economy, its developing status has a direct relation with the whole national economy. Upto the end of 2002, the total generating capacity has reached 352,950MW, among which the capacity of fire thermal generation holds 74.8% of the whole capacity, reaching 26,550 MW; and the generated power by thermal units possesses 83.1% of the whole, reaching 13,522 million kWh. But the study on thermal generating productivity is unsatisfactory. From the issue of"collecting funds for building power infrastructure"in 1985 to the issue of establishment of newly reorganized power companies in 2002, suggesting that the reform's aim has shifted from enlarging scale to improving efficiency. Under this background, it is necessary to study the productivity change of thermal generation, and analyze the major factors that influence the productivity of thermal generation, and evaluate the reform effect, and offer more effective suggestions. Thermal generation data (1993-2002) of 29 provinces, cities and municipalities were used to calculate the Malmquist productivity index by means of DEA, with the aid of the software LINDO, and the Malmquist productivity index is further decomposed into 3 parts: pure technical efficiency change (PTEC), scale efficiency change (SEC) and technical change(TC). The result shows that technical improvement advances the fire thermal generation productivity most, and the scale efficiency and pure technical efficiency have little effect on improving the productivity.