Ways to Improve the Efficiency of Clean Energy Utilization: Does Digitalization Matter?

Efficient utilization of clean energy is iminent for achieving the ambitious “dual-carbon” goal, digitalization provides favorable conditions for decarbonzation. Based on the data of 30 provinces in China, the biggest developing country, this study measures clean energy efficiency with improved DEA and digitalization with entropy method, and empirically explores the linear and nonlinear relationships from multidimensions. The major study findings are as follows. (1) On the whole from 2013 to 2017, digitalization and clean energy efficiency represent a steady growth trend, and the former increases by 8.98 % annually with a relatively low average level of 0.2286, while the latter increases by 1.24 % annually with a high average level of 0.9695. Meanwhile, regional heterogeneity of clean energy efficiency is significant. (2) digitalization can significantly promote clean energy efficiency with the marginal effect of 0.676, and clean energy efficiency increases by 0.0525 in the study period, indicating that 5.4 % of the improvement in clean energy efficiency caused by digitalization. (3) Hansen threshold analysis shows three nonlinear critical factors with single threshold and heterogeneous trends: technology innovation, energy consumption structure and population aggregation. Finally, according to the conclusions, corresponding policy suggestions are put forward.