Study On The Performance Of China's Provincial Power Systems And Its Driving Factors For The Efficiency Change

The electric power industry is one of the pillars of the national economy.It is also an important carbon emission emitter and fossil fuel consumer.Its operational performance is essential for the development of the whole society.With regard to the sector structure,the power system is a complex system composed of power generation,transmission and distribution departments.The performance of each subsector could affect the overall efficiency of integrated power system.To study the impact of the policy reform or management system reform on the efficiency of various departments can provide empirical evidence and policy reference for the future power reform.Considering the environmental factors such as carbon emission and line loss,and the interdependence among different departments,objectively analyzing the static and dynamic environmental efficiency of the power system can provide policy support for the short-term development of power system and long-term reform policy recommendations.First of all,this study applied the network slacks-based measure(NSBM)model to study the static environmental efficiency of the power systems of the provincial administrative areas in China.The static environmental efficiency of the generation,transmission and distribution divisions were also measured.Then,in order to research the effect of electricity reform policies,this paper applied the dynamic network slacksbased measure(DNSBM)to study the overall,division and time efficiency of the Chinese power systems.Scenario analysis was used to evaluate the actual effect of the reform policy of “separating power plants from grids” and then further evaluate the feasibility of the unbundling policy of separating the distribution from the transmission division.A Tobit model was used to study the impact of external environmental variables on the system efficiency.The results indicate that: 1)The DNSBM model may provide a new perspective to analyze the contribution of external factors to the system and division efficiencies.2)There are significant differences among the overall environmental efficiencies and the divisional efficiencies.Overall,the efficiency of eastern area is the highest and the efficiency of Northeast area is the lowest.At the divisional level,the generation sector has the highest efficiency and the distribution sector has the lowest efficiency.3)Both the customer density and energy consumption intensity have significant impacts on the system and division efficiencies.4)Similar to “separating power plants from grids”,the policy of “separate distribution from transmission” may have great potential for enhancing the efficiencies of power systems.