Allocation and Evolution of Government Attention in China’s Electric Power Industry: An Analysis Based on Policy Text

Abstract

This study aimed to identify a viable solution for the development of China’s electric power industry in line with “dual carbon” objectives. Accordingly, we collected and analyzed 2230 policy documents spanning 25 years to track the Chinese government’s focus on the electric power sector over time using latent Dirichlet allocation topic modeling. Our results reveal that the government’s area of emphasis differs across different stages of development. By analyzing the evolution of policy implementation, we identified the actions taken by government agencies at the policy level to promote the electric power industry. We then distilled the key themes of government attention and challenges facing the green transition of electricity in the context of “dual carbon”. Based on this analysis, we propose practical recommendations for restructuring power energy, enhancing power security, and improving power market efficiency. These findings hold important implications for China to achieve an environmentally sustainable electric power transformation.

1. Introduction

The electric power industry is an essential pillar of the national economy, and the safe and stable supply of electricity is a crucial guarantee for the sustainable development of the national economy. However, the excessive use of fossil energy in electricity production has exacerbated the greenhouse effect and poses a major threat to human health and survival. In 2016, the signing of the Paris Agreement marked a new phase in the global response to climate change. China, as the world’s largest energy consumer, accounting for 26.5% of global energy consumption [1], has attracted attention for its commitment to addressing climate change. In response to the Paris Agreement mandate, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced at the 75th session of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2020 that China committed to peak CO₂ emissions by 2030 and would work toward carbon neutrality by 2060 [2,3]. Subsequently, in October 2021, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council issued the Working Guidance for Carbon Dioxide Peaking and Carbon Neutrality in Full and Faithful Implementation of the New Development Philosophy, which enabled clear path-planning for the realization of the “dual carbon” target and proposed higher requirements for the electric power industry. The transformation of the electric power industry under the “dual carbon” target has become a focal point for the current academic community [4,5].

Finding a feasible path for the transformation of the electric power industry under the goal of “dual carbon” can be inspired by the development pattern of the electric power industry in the past. As a capital-intensive and technology-intensive basic industry, the electric power industry has a very close connection between its development and policies, and the support and guidance of policies provide the corresponding development framework and guiding direction for the electric power industry [6,7], which can help the electric power industry to realize its development goals at different stages of China’s economic and social development. For example, the National Plan to Address Climate Change (2014–2020) included a special plan for China’s 13th Five-Year Plan to address climate change, stating that China should reach the non-fossil energy target, accounting for about 15% of primary energy consumption, by 2020. Accordingly, the Chinese government launched several relevant measures to reach 15.9% of primary energy consumption by 2020, thus, successfully achieving the goal. The Chinese government has an efficient execution mechanism [8], and their efforts to reach the “dual carbon” goal in the electric power industry are backed by strong institutional support. It is helpful for us to understand the internal mechanisms of Chinese government departments’ modification of the development ideas of the electric power industry and examine how the government can effectively guide policy to achieve the new goal and promote the electric power industry’s clean and low-carbon development.

In the existing research, I have not yet found any article that studies the role of the Chinese government in macro-control of various links within the electric power industry from an industry-wide perspective. Hence, this study aims to fill the research gap in this area by analyzing the policy texts, digging deep into the allocation of the government’s attention that is implied in the policies, and revealing how the Chinese government guides the direction of the development of the electric power industry through the adjustments of its policies. In this way, this study achieves the goal of analyzing the role of the Chinese government’s policies in guiding the electric power industry. In the realization process, this study adopts the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic model to analyze the text of policy documents, which can effectively identify and explain the existing and related topics of a set of documents [9], and is conducive to the subsequent acquisition of the evolutionary relationship of the topics in each stage of the electric power industry policy. Specifically, this study collected 2230 electric power policy documents issued from 1996 to 2020 as the research object. The corpus consisting of these policy documents were entered into the LDA topic model, and the hotspots of attention of the Chinese government at different stages were examined, the evolution map of the government’s attention allocation drawn, and the dynamic change mechanism of the Chinese government’s policy concerns in the electric power industry obtained.

The rest of this study is structured as follows. Section 2 reviews the literature on China’s electric power industry policy analysis and government attention mechanism. Section 3 presents data and research methods. Section 4 develops the empirical results. Section 5 discusses the findings, highlights the characteristics of the Chinese government’s actions, and proposes related policy recommendations.

2. Review of the Literature

The government’s role in promoting the transformation of the electric power industry continues to attract scholars’ attention. Wüstenhagen and Bilharz [10] found that energy policy and green power marketing significantly contribute to promoting the development of renewable energy in Germany. Rogge and Johnstone [11] found that the phase-out policy had a positive impact on the technological innovation in renewable energy power generation in Germany. Furthermore, Shrimali and Kniefel [12] proved that national policies played a vital role in improving renewable energy penetration in the United States. Martin and Saikawa [13] found mandatory policies in the United States can effectively reduce emissions from power plants. Li et al. [14] reviewed the success in implementing China’s electric power industry policy in energy efficiency and atmospheric emission reduction. Moreover, several researchers are interested in examining the potential of electric power policy implementation in reducing carbon emissions [15], the actual efficiency of reducing carbon emissions [16], and the driving effect of green technology innovation [17]. The government’s policies have a significant influence on the development direction of the electric power industry. Appropriate policies can effectively promote the electric power industry’s transition to a clean and low-carbon industry [18,19,20] and help the power industry to achieve sustainable development consistent with economic, social, and environmental expectations.

Currently, most studies on electric power industry policies have focused on assessing the benefits of power industry policies to the power industry. Most scholars choose to measure the merits of policies by evaluating the effectiveness of electric power industry policy implementation. Bersalli et al. [21] conducted an econometric analysis of the effectiveness of renewable energy policies in Europe and Latin America, highlighting the specificity of policy approaches and motivations in different regions. Zhao et al. [22] and Xu et al. [23] empirically analyzed the effects of feasibility and implementation of wind power policies in China, respectively, and summarized the direction of the development of wind power policies in China by combining the results of model analysis. Moreover, Li et al. [24] evaluated the benefits and costs of measures to improve the energy efficiency and sustainability of China’s electric power industry and selected the measures that contribute the most to emission reduction. Zhao et al. [25] studied the impact of carbon tax and carbon tax policies on the electricity market to find whether they help to motivate green power producers to reduce production costs. An evaluation of the effectiveness of policy implementation in the electric power industry can effectively sort the policies that are favorable for the development of the electric power industry in different environments; however, it cannot effectively reflect the central government’s macro-controlling role in the power industry.

The central government, as a major institution with total control, has the power to appropriately allocate resources [26]. Its intervention is essential for promoting the transformation of the electric power industry [27]. Some scholars begin with the policy of the subdivision field under the electric power industry and summarize the appropriate development path in other fields within the electric power industry by reviewing the development process of various policies in the electric power industry over time. Renn and Marshall [28] examined the evolution of Germany’s coal, nuclear, and renewable energy policies across time, emphasizing the influence of accidents on policy development. Furthermore, Kelly-Richards et al. [29] summarized the urgent issues to improve the governance of small hydropower through a review of small hydropower policies and research. Zeng et al. [30] and Zhang et al. [31] summarized the problems and improvement space in China’s wind power and photovoltaic industry policies by comparing with other typical countries’ wind power and photovoltaic industries and examining the similarities and differences between China’s wind power and photovoltaic development trajectories. By examining the evolution of energy storage policies and public attention to energy storage, Fan et al. [32] found useful ways to promote energy storage. Regarding wind energy, Liao [33] studied the historical evolution of China’s wind energy policy using policy tools, and Yuan and Xi [34] systematically summarized the framework of Chinese wind power policy. Zhang et al. [35] reviewed policies of China’s coal power industry and discussed their impact on the development and technological progress of the coal power industry. After the Fukushima tragedy, Zeng et al. [36] examined global trends in nuclear policy, focusing on the development of nuclear energy in China and other nuclear powers.

In these studies, policies for various areas of the electric power industry have been compiled and analyzed, which can effectively summarize the scope for further policy improvements within each segment. However, these studies did not thoroughly examine the Chinese government’s macro control of the electric power industry’s each segment from the entire industry’s perspective, that is, the government’s focus on each component of the electric power industry, which may result in wrong government decisions [37]. Government attention is limited, and its focus can reflect the issues of most concern to the government in a given context [38,39]. By comparing the various degrees of attention that government departments pay to agricultural and energy policies under environmental concerns, Engstrom et al. [40] found that the importance of an issue is essential for attracting the government’s attention. Therefore, by identifying the focal points of government department’s attention on the electric power industry in different stages, one can observe the differences in the key issues faced at different times, and simultaneously, by analyzing government departments’ responses when faced with the key issues, it is helpful to deduce how government departments will make decisions in the new environmental context. Furthermore, policies significantly influence transformational changes [41]; thus, we examine the feasible routes for altering the electric power energy structure in response to the need for green development by analyzing policy evolution processes.

Based on the study of government’s attention allocation mechanism, this study addresses the research gap in the current study on attention allocation mechanism by analyzing the overall topic evolution of the policies in each field of the electric power industry, focusing on the central government’s attention allocation to the segmented fields at different times and obtaining information on how the government at the macro level responds to this, which provide a better response to the challenges in the new environment, better guidance for adjusting the configuration of electricity policies under the double carbon target, and provide reference proposals for accelerating the green transformation of China’s electric power industry.

3. Research Data and Methodology

3.1. Research Data

The Electricity Law of the People’s Republic of China, the first basic law of China’s electric power industry implemented in 1996, plays a large role in ensuring the development of China’s electric power industry, while the five-year plan, as an important part of China’s national economy, specifies the national economic development’s goals and directions [42]. In this study, the time frame of the policy documents is defined as 1996–2020 (i.e., the period from the 9th Five-Year Plan to the 13th Five-Year Plan), and the policy texts are divided into stages accordingly. The electric power industry policy texts are selected as the research objects to analyze the Chinese government’s attention toward development of electric power. The electric power industry policy documents include laws related to electric power promulgated by the National People’s Congress, as well as regulations, decisions, announcements, circulars, opinions, and other policies promulgated by the central government and relevant ministries and commissions, all of which are at the national level and can reflect the trend of national legislation and regulation.

The policy texts selected in this study are sourced from the “China Legal Retrieval System” (https://www.pkulaw.com/, accessed on 2 April 2022) and searched using the keyword “electric power” to obtain the central-government-issued relevant policy texts related to the electric power industry. After manual screening, irrelevant policy texts were eliminated and, finally, 2230 policy documents were finally identified as the final research object. As shown in

Table 1. Overview of the research data.

Policy Stage	Time Interval	Stage Content	Number of Policies	Sample Policy
Stage 1	1996–2000	The 9th Five-Year Plan	450	Notice of the issuance of the regulations on the registration of hydroelectric dam safety
Stage 2	2001–2005	The 10th Five-Year Plan	357	Notice on issues related to the regulation of electricity tariff management
Stage 3	2006–2010	The 11th Five-Year Plan	385	Notice on the issuance of the pilot measures for the management of renewable energy power generation prices and cost sharing
Stage 4	2011–2015	The 12th Five-Year Plan	474	Notice on the issuance of measures for demand side management of electricity
Stage 5	2016–2020	The 13th Five-Year Plan	564	Notice on regulating the pilot reform of incremental electricity distribution businesses
Total	1996–2020	The period from the 9th Five-Year Plan to the 13th Five-Year Plan	2230	-

, the first (9th Five-Year Plan), second (10th Five-Year Plan), third (11th Five-Year Plan), fourth (12th Five-Year Plan), and fifth stages (13th Five-Year Plan) contain 450, 357, 385, 474, and 564 documents, respectively.

3.2. Research Methodology

Theoretically, the government’s attention distribution will change with the update of development goals. This study examines the hotspots and evolution rules of government attention in the development of China’s power industry based on the topic evolution model and reveals where the government is focusing its attention on the electric power industry. The specific research framework is shown in Figure 1.

This study identifies the government attention’s hotspots contained in policy texts at various stages and the evaluation path of government attention based on the LDA topic model. Before using the LDA topic model, the policy text must be preprocessed, combined with custom dictionary maintenance, Chinese word separation, and deactivation removal methods to obtain the subtext, and combined with the bag-of-words model to vectorize the text to achieve the text feature extraction and the term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF–IDF) statistical method [43] to measure the weight of the subtext and assess the importance of the subtext to the corpus, which is calculated as follows:

$$TF-IDF(t,d)=TF(t,d)\times IDF(t)$$

(1)

where $TF(t,d)$ is the frequency of occurrence of word $t$ in document $d$ and $IDF(t)$ is the inverse document frequency to reflect the importance of word $t$ for expressing semantics.

Subsequently, we use the LDA topic model to find the implied intrinsic association between policy topics at various stages. The LDA model, proposed by Biel et al. [41], represents the topic probability distribution of a document by a k-dimensional-implied random variable obeying the Dirichlet distribution. The LDA is a topic model based on the Bayesian model, and its model is implemented by first drawing a topic for each document. The model schematic [44] is shown in Figure 2.

In Figure 2, α denotes the correlation between topics, β is the probability distribution of the topics themselves, both of which are empirically given a priori parameters; ${\theta }_i$ denotes the topic distribution of the ith document; ${\phi }_k$ denotes the feature word distribution of the kth topic; $z_{\mathit{ik}}$ denotes the kth topic of the ith document; and ${\mathit{w}}_{\mathit{ij}}$ denotes the jth feature word of the ith document, where $\overline{\phi }~\mathit{Dirichlet}(\overline{\alpha })$ and $\overline{\theta }~\mathit{Dirichlet}(\overline{\beta })$.

In the LDA topic model, document i is characterized by a series of steps. Firstly, the topic distribution ${\theta }_i$ of document i by sampling from the Dirichlet distribution α, then generates the kth topic $z_{\mathit{ik}}$ of the ith document by sampling from document i’s topic distribution ${\theta }_i$, then generates the kth topic’s feature word distribution ${\phi }_k$ by sampling from Dirichlet distribution β, and finally generates the kth topic’s feature word distribution ${\phi }_k$ by sampling from ${\phi }_k$ to generate the jth feature word $w_{\mathit{ij}}$ of the ith document.

For the LDA topic model, the topic distribution of the documents and the feature word distribution of the topics are unknown, and the parameters of the LDA topic model can be estimated by using the Gibbs sampling method [45], which, based on the determined α, β, and the number of topics, firstly assigns a random topic number to each word of each document in the corpus. Then the corpus is re-scanned, and for each word, Gibbs sampling is utilized to update the number of its topic, and the number of the word in the corpus is updated until Gibbs sampling converges. Finally, the topic of each word in each document in the corpus is counted to obtain the distribution of document topics; then the distribution of each word in each topic in the corpus is counted to obtain the distribution of topics and words.

In the LDA topic model, to ensure that the topic clustering results are representative, the perplexity index is generally used to evaluate the topic results [46] and determine the optimal number of topics. The lower the perplexity is, the better the topic clustering results are. The perplexity index [47] is calculated as follows:

$$Perplexity=\exp \left(-\frac{{\displaystyle \sum _{d=1}^M{\log }_{2}P(w_d)}}{{\displaystyle \sum _{d=1}^M{N}_d}}\right)$$

(2)

where $M$ is the number of documents, $N_d$ is the set of terms per document, and $P(w_d)$ is the probability of generating each term.

After completing the topic extraction work, we decide to use bubble diagrams to show the hotspots of electric power policy concerns in each stage, reflecting the intensity of the topics; draw Sankey diagrams based on the similarity scores between the topics in each stage; and observe to find the development evolution of policy hotspots in each stage.

Kullback–Leibler divergence (KLD) is a similarity calculation method that describes the difference between two probability distributions but has asymmetry, and the measurement of the similarity of the topics in the adjacent stages is not accurate enough. To achieve a more accurate measure of inter-subject similarity, this study selects Jensen–Shannon divergence (JSD), which is a variant of KLD with symmetry, as a measure of inter-subject similarity [48]. Its range is [0, 1], and the smaller the JSD is, the more similar the subjects are. The JSD calculation formula is as follows:

$$JS(P_1\parallel P_2)=\frac{1}{2}KL(P_1\parallel \frac{P_1+P_2}{2})+\frac{1}{2}KL(P_2\parallel \frac{P_1+P_2}{2})$$

(3)

To better observe the evolutionary relationship between the topics at each stage, the JSD value is transformed using the tangent cosecant function so that the topic similarity is positively correlated with the ${JS}_{change}$ value. The ${JS}_{change}$ value is calculated as follows:

$$J{S}_{change}=\cot (\frac{\pi }{2}\times JS(P_1\parallel P_2))$$

(4)

4. Research Findings

4.1. Identification of the Chinese Government’s Attention to the Electric Power Industry in Different Periods

Combining the explanation by Blei et al. [49] with the textual features of the policy text corpus, this study set the values of the key parameters α and β to 50/K and 0.1, respectively, and the number of iterations to 100. Subsequently, the study employed the Gibbs sampling technique to assign a topic label to each word in the document, thereby obtaining the word distribution of each topic at every stage. By counting the topics of each word in the document, the study derived the topic distribution of the document.

The two important input parameters of the LDA topic model are the document–word item matrix and the number of topics k. The document–word matrix can be obtained using a TF–IDF weight calculation of the policy text database obtained by word segmentation in the text preprocessing stage, and the number of topics k_i (i = 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) for the five stages is determined by calculating the perplexity index. After repeated experiments, the number of topics in the five stages was determined as 7, 7, 6, 7, 6. Subsequently, the LDA model was solved using the Gibbs sampling technique to group similar words into one topic, calculating the word distribution for each topic and the topic weights for each word as well as the topic distribution for each document, finally combining the policy content to give a suitable name to the topic extraction results. The results of the five stages of topic extraction are shown in

Table 2. The 5 stages of hot content of China’s electric power policy concerns in the last 25 years obtained by LDA topic model.

Topic Code	Topic Name	Category
95-1	Unit construction quality improvement	Electric power project construction
95-2	Technology project investment
95-4	Bid and tender management of the engineering project
95-7	Formulation of engineering construction specifications
95-3	Safety production assessment standard setting	Electric power safety management
95-6	Equipment safety and emergency
95-5	Reform of rural power system	Electricity marketization reform
105-2	Science and technology innovation support	Electric power project construction
105-5	Formulation of engineering construction standards
105-3	Safety production operation management	Electric power safety management
105-4	Improve the ability to maintain power supply
105-6	Power grid dispatching and its safe operation management
105-1	Supervision of electricity market construction	Electricity marketization reform
105-7	Electricity price reform
115-3	Improve the management system of electric power industry	Electric power project construction
115-5	Improve project construction standards
115-1	Safety production and emergency plan formulation	Electric power safety management
115-4	Electricity price reform	Electricity marketization reform
115-6	Power market transaction and power grid dispatching supervision
115-2	Subsidize the development of renewable energy power generation	Clean power generation
125-1	Power safety supervision	Electric power safety management
125-5	Power supply guarantee
125-3	Electricity market transaction supervision	Electricity marketization reform
125-4	Electricity price mechanism adjustment
125-2	Subsidy for new energy power generation	Clean power generation
125-6	Environmental impact review of power engineering project
125-7	Energy-efficient power generation technology research and development (R&D) support
135-1	Power safety supervision	Electric power safety management
135-4	Electricity market supervision and perfect electricity price mechanism	Electricity marketization reform
135-2	Carry out pilot reform of incremental distribution business	Clean power generation
135-3	Strengthen power demand side management
135-5	Supervision and management of electric power business
135-6	Carbon reduction power generation mode support

. Among these, 95-n, 105-n, 115-n, 125-n, and 135-n denote the nth topic in the 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, and 13th Five-Year Plan periods, respectively.

Combined with the LDA topic model to calculate the intensity of each topic [44], this study uses bubble plots to visualize the results. The size of the bubbles indicates the change in intensity of the main topics and is presented on the bubble plots in the order labeled 1–n. The distribution of the hotspots of electricity policy topics in different periods is shown in Figure 3.

During the 9th Five-Year Plan, approximately 87.5% of the policies related to the construction of electric power projects and electric power safety-related topics, the formulation of various safety policies ensures the stable operation of the electric power system, while technological innovation in electric power projects could drive the continuous improvement of electric power production efficiency, laying the technical foundation for the use of new energy-saving power generation methods. During the 10th Five-Year Plan, government departments still attached great importance to electric power production safety. At this time, electric power marketization-construction-related topics of concern rose to 35.2%, and strengthening the market-oriented supervision became the top priority of this time. During the 11th Five-Year Plan, market reform and security issues of electric power continued to be the focus of government departments. With the official implementation of the Renewable Energy Law of the People’s Republic of China [50], the green development of the electric power industry became a new hot spot of concern. During the 12th Five-Year Plan, the attention to the green development of the electric power industry was further enhanced, and the content of clean-power-related policies rose to 48.3%, and from the perspective of technological innovation, electric power demand side and other perspectives, to accelerate the pace of achieving energy saving and emission reduction targets. Moreover, safety issues and market-oriented reforms continued to gain the attention of government departments. During the 13th Five-Year Plan period, the government issued more comprehensive guidelines for the green development of the electric power industry and based on the previous one, tried to implement a pilot reform of the incremental distribution business to promote the consumption of renewable energy in the vicinity.

4.2. Chinese Government’s Path of Attention to the Electric Power Industry

An analysis of the focus of China’s electric power development at different times in Section 4.1 shows that the Chinese government’s attention to electric power development has changed during different periods and produced dynamic changes over time. To examine the government attention’s transmission and diffusion pattern, this study uses the topic evolution approach to find the link between topics based on the similarity of topics in two adjacent stages, analyze the internal factors that change Chinese government’s attention over time, and reform the development of each attention hotspot.

The similarity measure chosen in this study is the ${JS}_{change}$ value mentioned in Section 3.2, and the Sankey diagram is used to visualize and present the similarity of topics in adjacent stages to map the transfer path of government attention. The data with a mean value of 1.58 for the similarity between topics at each stage were selected as the threshold, and the Sankey diagram of the topic evolution of Chinese electric power policy using the pyecharts library in Python is shown in Figure 4. Each column represents the five stages in the development of the electric power industry. The element blocks in the same column are the contents of the topics extracted under that stage. The size of the element blocks indicates the degree of similarity between each topic and the topics in the next stage; therefore, it can reflect the evolution of the topics in the next cycle and the path direction, and the width of the connecting line between each column is the similarity value between the topics.

4.2.1. Ongoing Hotspots of Concern

The topics on production safety, electric power marketization, and electricity price adjustment are presented at each stage; however, the specific measures are adjusted at different stages combined with the actual situation of China’s electric power development to make it sustainable and solve the actual problems at different stages to stay updated.

First, the discussion on electric power safety has been continued at each stage. Combined with the measure of the intensity of the topic in Section 4.1, electric power safety has always been a topic to which the Chinese government attaches great importance. As a basic resource, electric power significantly impacts normal society and people’s lives, and ensuring the safety of electric power is an essential prerequisite for the robust development of the electric power industry. The safety of electric power in different stages of time is influenced by the environment to some extent in China. During the 9th Five-Year Plan period, the Chinese government urged electric power companies to improve safety measures related to equipment and personnel operations by establishing safety production indexes and assessment standards. In the 10th Five-Year Development Plan for the Electric Power Industry, grid security was emphasized, prompting the government to focus on the safety management of grid dispatching and to make efforts in improving the guarantee of electric power supply without neglecting power production. During the 11th Five-Year Plan period, natural disasters such as earthquakes severely affected the stable operation of the power system. Consequently, the government prioritized emergency response and the safe development of nuclear power, leading to increased investment in science and technology to lay a technological foundation for secure production. Following the 12th Five-Year Plan, the advancement of digital technology has resulted in the institutionalization, standardization, and formalization of electric power safety supervision. Nonetheless, this progress also introduces the issue of power network information security, which necessitates proactive prevention by the relevant departments. The Chinese government’s attention to electric power safety production is gradual and constantly improved upon based on continuous summary of historical experience, which has a key role in the stable development of China’s electric power industry.

Second, the pace of electric power marketization and the electricity price mechanism adjustment are advancing with the implementation of the electric power system reform. During the 9th Five-Year Plan period, the electric power industry experienced the initial separation of government and enterprises within the market economic system. This led to the vigorous promotion of unified pricing for urban and rural power supply, as well as the implementation of project bidding management, effectively laying the foundation for the market mechanism to operate. Subsequently, starting from the 10th Five-Year Plan period, the pace of electric power marketization accelerated with the introduction of a new round of reforms in 2002. The goals of this reform included the separation of factory and grid, primary and secondary separation, transmission and distribution separation, and the implementation of competitive bidding. Furthermore, the tariff mechanism is undergoing further improvements to ensure timely reflection of cost changes. After the 12th Five-Year Plan period, the Chinese government increasingly focused on enabling the market to play a decisive role in resource allocation and enhancing the market-based pricing mechanism. The aim was to ensure prompt reflection of cost changes in tariff. Additionally, the government’s focus on marketizing electric power and refining the electricity price mechanism integrates with the establishment of more links between green development and the construction of the electric power market. This integration promotes the green transformation of the power generation industry.

4.2.2. Fading Hotspots

Over time, some topics are gradually absorbed by other topics and are no longer treated as independent topics of concern by government departments. For example, during the 9th Five-Year Plan period, significant attention was paid to the construction specifications of electric power projects as part of the development of infrastructure construction specifications. This focus continued to the 10th and 11th Five-Year Plan periods, with strict requirements imposed on construction standards. However, after the 12th Five-Year Plan period, the focus shifted toward safety production and power supply guarantee. Consequently, the concern for construction standards became integrated into the topic of ensuring stable electric power operation. Although the government is no longer concerned about the topic of construction standards for electric power projects, it has laid a solid institutional foundation for the new hot topic and become an indispensable cornerstone for the stable operation of electric power.

4.2.3. Newly Emerging Hotspots

Similarly, as the electric power industry evolves, new hotspots of concern emerge in response to the renewal of the national development strategy, and the support for renewable energy power generation is a new topic during the 11th Five-Year Plan period. From the 11th Five-Year Plan period, government departments began providing price subsidies to non-water renewable energy generation methods to encourage the use and development of renewable energy. Simultaneously, government departments offered responsive support for the technical research and development of renewable energy generation technology, thus, increasing the proportion of renewable energy in the energy structure, thereby promoting energy transformation. Over time, the expansion of renewable energy power projects has accelerated. During the 13th Five-Year Plan period, government departments not only depend on financial subsidies to support renewable energy power generation but also combine the use of “green certificates + quotas” and other methods to effectively manage the pace of development of renewable energy power generation industry to facilitate the transition of renewable energy power generation projects to high-quality development and considerably relieve the pressure on government financial subsidies.

5. Discussion

The analysis of the topic hotspots and evolution paths in each stage in Section 4 can be summarized into three characteristics of China’s electric power industry development.

(1) Adhere to the principle of safety first and emphasize on improving the power emergency disposal, (2) gradually deepen the reform of the electric power system and promote the development of the electric power market, and (3) optimize and adjust the power energy structure and advance the green development of the power industry.

First, ensuring the safety of electric power remains an eternal priority of the electric power industry. The safety of electric power production is closely related to the safety of people’s lives and property. Moreover, the safe production of electric power involves various aspects, such as the limitation of safety management system, development of an atmosphere of enterprise safety culture, and implementation of safety responsibility. It also includes the development of innovative security technologies and the prevention of power information network security. The safety management system establishes norms and standards for electric power enterprises, clarifies safety requirements and procedures, and creates institutional constraints through safety risk assessment, accident reporting and investigation, and emergency response plans. By strengthening safety education and training, electric power enterprises cultivate a good safety culture and promote compliance with safety regulations. Implementing safety management responsibilities and conducting safety risk assessments and investigations helps prevent power accidents, improves employee safety awareness and emergency response capabilities, reduces operating errors and irregularities, and ultimately reduces the risk of accidents. Innovative security technology optimizes power system management efficiency, enhances disaster response and risk management capabilities, and protects the safe and reliable operation of the power system. Strict data protection and authority management mechanisms, encrypted communication, access control, data backup, and other security measures ensure the confidentiality and integrity of electric power system data and safeguard the security of the electric power information network, thus, ensuring the reliability of electric power supply services. Meanwhile, in recent years, extreme weather and natural disasters have occurred frequently, and the emergency response to crises is also an indispensable part of electric power safety. On the one hand, it is important to develop standardized and procedural emergency plans for possible disasters in advance to ensure the effectiveness and enforceability of the plans. On the other hand, it is also necessary to organize drills for conceivable emergencies and discover the hidden dangers in the drills to further improve the emergency plans, accumulate experience, and enhance the production personnel’s ability to manage accidents and ensure the safe and stable operation of the power system.

Second, China’s electric power system reform has always been based on its national conditions and rooted in its own institutional conditions, from the highly centralized traditional planned electric power system, and gradually reformed toward marketization, examining the electric power market mechanism that is unique to China. China’s reform of the electric power system focuses on being problem-oriented and strives to achieve the reform goals of “separation of factory and grid, separation of the main and the secondary, transmission and distribution separation, and competitive bidding” through gradual progress, timely discovery of the problems arising in the reform process, compensating for the defects in the reform, and further adjusting and deepening the reform goals by combining the characteristics of the times to ensure the effective implementation of the electric power market reform measures. Currently, China’s electric power market-oriented reform, by the requirements of “managing the middle and liberalizing both ends”, implements the reform strategy of “medium and long-term trading as the mainstay, spot trading as a supplement”, promotes the orderly liberalization of electric power generation and use; the gradual improvement in the market operation framework, and enhancement of the resource allocation efficiently; continuous trial and error, innovation, and improvement; and the gradual opening up of the market-oriented trading situation. The gradual improvement in the electric power market system and market-oriented tariff mechanism has provided opportunities and platforms for various types of electric power resources to discover their functional value, and further guided the green transformation of electric power. Under the role of the electric power market, the development of new energy resources has shifted from guaranteed acquisition to market-based consumption and pricing, and conventional power supply has shifted from administrative peaking to being guided by market price signals, which has pushed the new energy industry to enter a mature commercial stage; promoted the rational allocation and optimal use of electric power resources; improved the quality of electric power supply and electric power supply reliability; and provided better electric power services for residents and industrial and commercial users.

Third, since the 11th Five-Year Plan period, the Chinese government has been increasingly focusing on the topic of green electric power, adjusting the energy structure of electric power, and gradually realizing the replacement of clean energy as an important goal in the development of electric power. The rise in the country’s economic strength has enabled government departments to adopt subsidies to vigorously support the development of renewable energy power generation at the initial stage of promoting the green transformation of electric power and energy, and successively introduce foreign advanced technology and equipment to continuously improve the efficiency and stability of renewable energy power generation, based on which the ability of local innovation is enhanced, and combined with market-oriented means to attract enterprises and individuals to participate in the process of green transformation of electric power and energy to promote green low-carbon technological innovation and progress, continuously promote the development and utilization of clean energy such as solar energy, wind energy, and hydro energy, increase the proportion of installed non-fossil energy power generation, and continuously enhance the efficiency of renewable energy power generation. While coal power is the main force in the current power supply, government departments will focus on technological innovation, through the flexibility of the transformation and other ways to improve the efficiency of energy conversion, reduce the emission of pollutants, and promote clean and efficient development and utilization of coal. The green transformation of electric power is transformative and disruptive, and the process of transformation requires a two-way effort from both the supply and demand sides. On the supply side, through electric power decarbonization and fuel decarbonization, a new energy supply system with new energy being the main source and fossil energy as the guaranteed energy source will be constructed to provide zero-carbon electric power and renewable fuel. On the demand side, through process reshaping, re-electrification, replacing fossil fuels with renewable fuels, and replacing non-renewable raw materials with green raw materials will occur, thus, realizing the decarbonization of the electric power industry and accelerating the sustainable green development of the electric power industry.

6. Policy Suggestions and Study’s Limitations

The proposed “dual carbon” goal has accelerated the green transformation process of China’s electric power industry, and it is difficult to build a new clean and low-carbon electric power system under the premise of ensuring a safe and stable operation of the electric power system. However, this issue should be solved in the current development process of China’s electric power industry. Based on the analysis of the hotspots and the evolution of the topic of the electric power industry from the 9th Five-Year Plan to the 13th Five-Year Plan periods and the current realistic problems faced by China’s electric power development, this study proposes the following recommendations.

First, improve emergency response capabilities, counter the threat posed by extreme weather, and prioritize the protection of electric power safety and household electricity. The green transformation of power structure is a long-term work, and government departments should make contingency plans to cope with the short-term fluctuations and ensure the safe and stable operation of the power system. Influenced by global warming, the frequent occurrence of extreme weather in recent years has had a significant impact on the stable supply of electric power. In July 2021, Henan experienced extraordinarily heavy rainfall, which damaged one-third of the electric power facilities. In August 2022, Sichuan Province experienced extreme heat and dry weather for the first time in 60 years, leading to a shortage of hydropower generation capacity and industrial power restrictions and shutdown. Protecting households’ electricity consumption and electric power security during extreme weather conditions has become the key question that must be addressed by the electric power department. Therefore, government departments must face the threats posed by extreme weather, ensure accurate forecasts, develop corresponding emergency plans in advance, ensure that the electric power system can provide sufficient capacity, flexibly adjust the allocation and dispatch of electric power resources, and reduce the impact of extreme weather on the normal electricity consumption of households. Hydropower accounts for 85% in Sichuan Province’s electric power structure, which is greatly affected by the climate. Since July 2022, Sichuan Province has continued to experience high temperatures and low precipitation, leading to reducing water levels of several water rivers, reducing the amount of hydropower generation, while the high temperature increases household’s electricity consumption. Sichuan Province has a strong demand for electricity supply and is responsible for transmitting electricity out of the province as part of the “west-to-east power transmission” strategy, which has exacerbated the power shortage as the amount of electricity transmitted to other provinces cannot be reduced. Therefore, hydropower generation and other strong dependence on natural conditions of electric power generation cannot be used as the main power source to ensure a safe and stable supply of electricity. Thus, power supply planning should make timely adjustments, consider coal power and other means for timely electric power supply, and strengthen the grid cross-zone electric power emergency support capacity to improve and protect the electric power supply under extreme conditions. Nowadays, China is once again facing the impact of the summer electric power peak on its power supply. In light of the ongoing green transformation of the power structure, the Chinese government must learn from past experiences and conduct thorough research to formulate a corresponding contingency plan. This plan should aim to promote new energy power generation and establish synergy between coal power and peak load demands, thereby enhancing the grid’s extreme risk prevention and control capabilities. One notable initiative that has been taken involves the six terraced hydropower stations located along the main stream of the Yangtze River. These stations are currently operating at maximum capacity, effectively harnessing the power of each drop of water six times over. As a result, they have successfully eased the tension of electric power consumption during the summer in east and central China. Moreover, the current coal inventory held by national unified power plants has reached an unprecedented high. This has further incentivized coal power to participate in peak shifting, reinforcing the operational security and resilience of the entire electric power system. Undoubtedly, these measures have strengthened China’s overall electric power supply capacity. However, it is important to acknowledge that these improvements might be tested if there is a sustained period of extremely high temperatures during the summer. Under such conditions, the demand for electric power may escalate rapidly while power generation output declines. Consequently, there is a potential risk of exacerbating the already tight supply and demand situation in some areas. To address this challenge, it is imperative for government departments to strengthen electric power supply in key areas during peak hours. Furthermore, it is essential to enhance prediction capabilities regarding supply situations and ensure the safe and stable provision of electric power even under extreme conditions.

Second, strengthening the linkage between the electric power and carbon markets, stimulating renewable energy consumption, and promoting the participation of energy storage in the electric power market plays a flexible response role. In China’s electric power system reform, the pace of marketization and the integration of green development concepts have become increasingly close. Starting from the Opinions on Further Deepening Electric Power System Reform released in 2015, government departments have supported the green transformation of the electric power energy structure and increased energy conservation and emission reduction from a market allocation perspective by prioritizing electric power generation and power purchase to protect public welfare by electric power generation and clean energy access. The “dual carbon” target imposes additional demands on the power market. It promotes the adjustment of electric energy structure and thereby increases the proportion of renewable energy generation, leading to supply uncertainty for the electric power system. The existing electric power market model and the new energy structure should be continuously adjusted, and the market trading mechanism should consider the impact of the “dual carbon” target to modify and improve to ensure the consumption of renewable energy and the stability of the electric power system. The construction of carbon market is an important measure for China to achieve the goal of “dual carbon”, and China’s carbon market has realized the synergistic management of pollution control and carbon emission reduction [51], while the electric power industry, as the industry with the largest carbon emissions, establishes a linkage mechanism between the electric power and carbon markets, controls the use of high-carbon-emission coal power, and further promotes the marketization of coal power prices, which will help the electric power industry achieve its carbon emission reduction goals and adapt to the real situation of electric power supply. The “green certificates + quotas” approach, although it has been proved to play a certain role in promoting green energy transition [52], should be further improved by substantially increasing the incentives to adjust the quotas on the basis of ensuring the security of electric power supply, encouraging more enterprises to invest in new energy power generation, and promoting the development of supply-side renewable energy power generation technology. Meanwhile, the energy storage technology also rapidly develops with the renewable energy power generation technology, and the energy storage can play a major role in the ability of peak-shaving and valley-filling in the electric auxiliary service; therefore, perfecting the energy storage pricing system and the incentive mechanism of the main body providing the electric power auxiliary service is a practice that needs long-term application and exploration in the process of electric power green transformation.

Finally, the transformation of energy and electricity should be gradual, steadily increasing the proportion of non-fossil energy generation and fully using the grid resource allocation capacity. China has supported renewable energy generation from several years and has achieved good results [53]. Although both the installed capacity of non-fossil energy sources and electric power generation have significantly increased, there is still a large gap between the power support capacity of non-fossil energy sources and traditional power sources. However, both sources cannot completely replace the role played by thermal electric power generation in the electric power system; therefore, the improvement in the efficient use of non-fossil energy is a major challenge in the scientific research and development of the electric power industry. Continuous research and application of advanced technology is a strong support for the high-quality development of green transformation. As an important pillar of the traditional electric power structure, coal power can flexibly adjust to compensate for the uncertainty in non-fossil energy generation, and the development of coal power cannot be suppressed simply by using strong measures to significantly reduce its share in the electric power structure. Currently, the elimination of coal power should start from clean use of coal power, which can not only ensure a more stable supply of electric power, but also reduce the pollution emission of coal power. Carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technology is considered among the crucial solutions to address carbon emissions. However, the current state of CCUS technology in China appears to have significant room for improvement [54]. Therefore, it is imperative for the relevant departments to bolster their support for research and development in this field. This will enable the provision of robust technical support necessary to achieve substantial reduction in carbon emissions from coal power plants. In addition, the grid also plays a large role in the consumption of clean energy. However, increased non-fossil energy access to the grid also increases the system’s instability and encourages the construction of smart grids. Therefore, the government should strengthen the application of digital technology in the smart grid, improve the dynamic sensing ability of the grid, and enhance the efficiency of resource allocation and the capacity of new energy consumption. Furthermore, the development of new energy storage is essential to meet the growing demand for electric power, and the development of new energy storage is crucial to meet the increasing electricity demand. By utilizing new energy storage technologies to store surplus electricity and address the discrepancy between the supply and demand of renewable energy sources [55], the operational efficiency of the power system can be further improved.

Meanwhile, the study still exists with some limitations. The policy documents issued by the central government in the electric power industry provide a foundation for this study, but given the small number of electric power industry policy documents issued during the current 14th Five-Year Plan period, which do not provide a comprehensive picture of the government’s allocation of attention, the electric power industry policy documents starting from 2021 were not included in the study, and many governmental decisions that are not within the selected type of policy documents were also ignored, which may have an impact on the conclusions drawn in this study. There is a significant disparity in the distribution of power resources across different regions of China. This means that a set of programs cannot simply be applied to each province, and a more detailed analysis of local government attention is needed. In terms of research methodology, this study employs the LDA topic model to analyze the allocation of government attention. However, this method is unsupervised and highly subjective. Furthermore, this method does not involve the participation of domain experts in the process of topic extraction and reasoning induction. Consequently, the professionalism of topic generalization needs to be improved.

7. Conclusions

This study uses a topic modeling approach to analyze and map the focus areas and evolution paths of the Chinese government in development of electric power industry. It examines the policy documents released at each stage from the 9th Five-Year Plan to the 13th Five-Year Plan periods. By identifying government attention focuses at different stages and analyzing the evolution trajectory of government topics, we summarize the characteristics of the Chinese government’s actions in formulating electricity policies, including:

(1)

Adhering to the principle of safety first and emphasize on improving the power emergency disposal;

(2)

Gradually deepening the reform of the electric power system and promoting the development of the electric power market;

(3)

Optimizing and adjusting the power energy structure and advancing the green development of the power industry.

Building on the refined analysis of government attention evolution, this paper addresses the challenges faced by the green transformation of the electric power industry within the context of “dual carbon”. Practical suggestions are proposed regarding the adjustment of electric power energy structure, electric power security supply, and the electric power market, including:

(1)

Improve emergency response capabilities, counter the threat posed by extreme weather, and prioritize the protection of electric power safety and household electricity;

(2)

Strengthening the linkage between the electric power and carbon markets, stimulating renewable energy consumption, and promoting the participation of energy storage in the electric power market plays a flexible response role;

(3)

The transformation of energy and electricity should be gradual, steadily increasing the proportion of non-fossil energy generation and fully using the grid resource allocation capacity.

These recommendations aim to facilitate China’s achievement of green transformation in its electric power industry, utilizing appropriate approaches. It is worth noting that China has established intergovernmental energy cooperation mechanisms with more than 50 countries and regions, and has engaged in green energy project cooperation with over 100 countries and regions. The insights gained from examining the Chinese government’s attention focuses and the evolution process can also provide guidance for other countries in adjusting their power sector policies. Therefore, it is also important to explore the differences between the Chinese government’s attention allocation and that of other countries in future research. By investigating the root causes of these differences through comparative analysis, a more comprehensive understanding of the unique challenges and opportunities faced by China in achieving an environmentally sustainable power transition can be gained. This, in turn, will enhance China’s international competitiveness in the field of electric power transition.