On May 15th, the National Finals of the China National College Students Competition on Energy Economics (CNCEE) concluded, and the research project “Embodied carbon emissions induced by the construction of hydropower infrastructure in China” won the grand prize. The project was undertaken by Ge Zewen, a master student at the China-UK Low Carbon College of Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), under the joint guidance of Professor Geng Yong and Associate Professor Wei Wendong.

As the only national competition in energy economy and low carbon development, the CNCEE was jointly initiated and organized nationwide by the Low Carbon Development Management Branch of the Chinese Society of Optimization, Overall Planning and Economical Mathematics (CSOOPEM) and several dozens of universities and hosted by the CSOOPEM in 2015. It has been held multiple times, offering opportunities for discussing interdisciplinary solutions to key and difficult problems in energy economy and low carbon development and sparking huge social responses from across a number of fields such as energy economy, low carbon development and environmental management.

[The prize-winning project]

Name: Embodied carbon emissions induced by the construction of hydropower infrastructure in China

Instructors: Geng Yong and Wei Wendong

Prize-winner: Ge Zewen

Oral defense at the finals

Project overview:

Hydropower has played a key role as one of the important renewables in China’s energy transition. However, due to the massive input of energy-intensive materials, hydroelectric infrastructure construction has led to colossal amounts of direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions. To solve this problem, this study calculated the implicit carbon emissions produced throughout hydroelectric infrastructure construction across the country from 2006 to 2015 with the input-output analysis, explained its evolution, identified its drivers and proposed policy recommendations for its reduction. The framework of this study can also be applied to other calculations of implicit carbon emissions produced by infrastructure construction, in a bid to offer data as a reference for China’s development of a unified standard for carbon emissions produced by infrastructure construction and support the decision-making in terms of identifying pathways to carbon emissions produced by infrastructure construction.

Cumulative carbon emissions produced by infrastructure construction across different provinces of China in a)2006; and b) 2015; embodied carbon emissions per capita in c)2006; and d)2015.