Background
Over the past two decades, a wide variety of institutions have conducted research on reforming China’s power system, including the World Bank’s research on this in 1990s, the Energy Foundation’s Power Sector Reform Report in 2002 and other reports on splitting grids and building micro-grids in 2002 and 2003.
Up to now, these reform discussions have concentrated on enhancing market influence in the sector, improving its regulation, and on how to carry out reforms in state-owned power enterprises. There has been little discussion of reforms in price-setting, although currently both the retail and feed-in tariffs are heavily regulated in ways that do not promote efficiency.
There has been even less research on pricing reforms that take environmental and climate considerations into account. This project aims to address the issue.