An evolutionary analysis of new energy and industry policy tools in China based on large-scale policy topic modeling

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 16; no. 5; p. e0252502
• Main Authors: Wang, Qiqing, Li, Cunbin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: San Francisco Public Library of Science 28.05.2021; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Alternative energy sources; Carbon dioxide; Carbon dioxide emissions; Clustering; Computer applications; Earth Sciences; Ecology and Environmental Sciences; Economic development; Economic growth; Economic policy; Emissions; Emissions control; Energy conservation; Energy industry; Energy policy; Energy sources; Engineering and Technology; Environmental changes; Environmental policy; Forecasts and trends; Industry; Neighborhoods; People and Places; Photovoltaic cells; Photovoltaics; Physical Sciences; Policy analysis; Renewable energy; Renewable energy sources; Residential energy; Social media; Social Sciences; Sustainability; Turbines; Wind power; Wind turbines; China; Beijing China; United States > US
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0252502

This study investigates the evolution of provincial new energy policies and industries of China using a topic modeling approach. To this end, six out of 31 provinces in China are first selected as research samples, central and provincial new energy policies in the period of 2010 to 2019 are collected to establish a text corpus with 23, 674 documents. Then, the policy corpus is fed to two different topic models, one is the Latent Dirichlet Allocation for modeling static policy topics, another is the Dynamic Topic Model for extracting topics over time. Finally, the obtained topics are mapped into policy tools for comparisons. The dynamic policy topics are further analyzed with the panel data from provincial new energy industries. The results show that the provincial new energy policies moved to different tracks after about 2014 due to the regional conditions such as the economy and CO.sub.2 emission intensity. Underdeveloped provinces tend to use environment-oriented tools to regulate and control CO.sub.2 emissions, while developed regions employ the more balanced policy mix for improving new energy vehicles and other industries. Widespread hysteretic effects are revealed during the correlation analysis of the policy topics and new energy capacity.