Purpose
China’s national carbon market will be officially launched in 2020, when it will become the world’s largest carbon market. However, China’s carbon market is faced with various major challenges. One of the most important challenges is its impact on the social and economic development of arid and semi-arid regions. By simulating the carbon price trends under different economic development and energy consumption levels, this study aims to help the government can plan ahead to formulate various countermeasures to promote the integration of arid and semi-arid regions into the national carbon market.
Design/methodology/approach
To achieve this goal, this paper builds a back propagation neural network model, takes the third phase of the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) as the research object and uses the mean impact value method to screen out the important driving variables of European Union Allowance (EUA) price, including economic development (Stoxx600, Stoxx50, FTSE, CAC40 and DAX), black energy (coal and Brent), clean energy (gas, PV Crystalox Solar and Nordex) and carbon price alternatives Certification Emission Reduction (CER). Finally, this paper sets up six scenarios by combining the above variables to simulate the impact of different economic development and energy consumption levels on carbon price trends.
Findings
Under the control of the unchanged CER price level, economic development, black energy and clean energy development will all have a certain impact on the EUA price trends. When economic development, black energy consumption and clean energy development are on the rise, the EUA price level will increase. When the three types of variables show a downward trend, except for the sluggish development of clean energy, which will cause the EUA price to rise sharply, the EUA price trend will also decline accordingly in the remaining scenarios.
Originality/value
On the one hand, this paper incorporates driving factors of carbon price into the construction of carbon price prediction system, which not only has higher prediction accuracy but also can simulate the long-term price trend. On the other hand, this paper uses scenario simulation to show the size, direction and duration of the impact of economic development, black energy consumption and clean energy development on carbon prices in a more intuitive way.
The future of coal supply in China based on non-fossil energy development and carbon price strategies
