Spatial And Temporal Characteristics Of China’s Energy Consumption And Its Influencing Factors

Energy is associated with every evolution of mankind’s history, and it isessential material resource of mankind’s manufacture and life. Energy is not only animportant factor of economic growth, but also can interact with economic growth’simportant factors such as investment, science, technology and resource allocation,thus play an important impact on economic growth. The fact also shows that China’sextensive energy consumption in recent years has threat China’s economicdevelopment step by step and China’s economic growth has encounteredunprecedented “bottleneck”.Considering the national economic and socialdevelopment，strengthening the energy-saving is an important trend and the basicprinciple of economic and social development in “The twelfth five year plan”．Therefore,in this context, it is extremely important to study the energy consumption of China’seconomic growth.Firstly,this article analyzes the situation of energy consumption in China,finds that China’s total energy consumption increased year by year, but per capitaenergy consumption is lower than the world average, energy consumption structure isirrational and the energy distribution is not consistent with the consumptiondistribution.Then it applies region conditioning Kernel density estimates and spatialMarkov chains methods to study China’s energy consumption distribution dynamicsfrom both temporal dynamics and spatial dynamics perspectives.The results show thatthe energy consumption gap in China’s inter-provincial tendency to expand; neighboreffect in the process of regional development exist, there are significant interactionsbetween the regional economies; the relative positions of all regions’energyconsumption in the distribution are stable, the state of energy consumption generallydo not change over time, and it is easy to rise but difficult to decline.Furthermore,itdetailly analysied the energy consumption status in China，selects six influencefactors including economic growth rate，proportion of secondary industry,foreigndirect investment,the number of population, the level of urbanization,the number ofpatents,using econometric methods to establish econometric model,and analyses theinfluence factors of energy consumption.The results showed that the total energyconsumption and the six factors are positive correlation. Population growth and urbanization has the most significant impact on energy consumption.At last,it obtainsthe main conclusions and put forward five recommendations to improve the energysituation in the course of China’s economic growth: Strengthening regional energystrategy cooperation and hardening the local energy-saving assessment;controllingthe total energy consumption; adjusting the energy utilization structure; increasinginvestment in science and technology;strengthening institutional building of technicalprogress and technological innovation; optimizing the industrial structure.