Development Status and the Biomass Energy Policies in China

Abstract

In the past decades, China has adopted a wide variety of policies to stimulate bioenergy development, playing a more significant role in China’s energy structure. However, bioenergy development in China is still at an early stage and lags far behind other foreign countries. This study is aimed to explore the reasons behind this sluggish development from a policy perspective. Bioenergy development potential and provincial geographic distribution were investigated in China, which shows that the total technical bioenergy potential was about 0.85 GtCE in China in 2015. After analyzing the calculated allocation flow of bioenergy, it can be drawn that biomass power generation accounts for the highest proportion of bioenergy applications. A three-dimensional policy analysis framework is put forward to analyze the selected representative 72 pieces of biomass policies. It is concluded that there are some unbalanced policy problems, such as lacking demand policies in the biomass power generation industry and few applications of voluntary policies.