Suchergebnisse

Natural gas is expected to provide over 10% of China's total primary energy consumption in 2020, which is a significant increase from 6.2% in 2014. A diverse range of factors can have impacts on China's gas demand, including resource endowment, gas-access-rate (infrastructure), industry structure, urbanization, income, gas and alternative energy price, environmental awareness, government priorities, seasonal weather variations and so on. These factors can have different impact on the sectoral gas consumption at different locations. In order to understand the impact of these drivers on gas production and consumption of different provinces in China, we conduct case studies in five provinces, including the wealthy regions (Guangdong and Beijing), the gas producing regions (Sichuan and Shaanxi), and other regions (Shandong). We found that energy consumption growth in China is likely to remain moderate in the next decade. The role that gas can play is likely to change from taking a share of the growing demand to replacing the existing energy supply from other sources (mainly other fossil fuels). In general, such replacement will depend on several factors, such as the relative price levels of gas compared to alternative energy sources, the environmental impacts, and whether there will be a sufficient and secure supply. At the sectoral level, one of the main factors that determine gas consumption in different regions is the structure of the regional economy. A regional economy where industry represents a higher proportion of total GDP tends to use a higher proportion of gas in industry, though its share in total gas consumption has been declining; whilst for a regional economy dominated by services, the use of gas in the residential and commercial sectors is more significant. Residential gas consumption is growing in most regions with the improving gas infrastructure. Together with the growing trend of urbanization, residential consumption represents a significant opportunity for the future growth of gas, especially in ...

Wind power in China has experienced significant growth since the beginning of this century. Total installed capacity has increased almost 300 fold – from 346 MW in 2000 to 91,413 MW in 2013. This rapid development however has created new set of challenges. In particular, wind power has not been fully integrated into the electricity system as a whole, as the growth of wind generation capacity has not been matched by a corresponding growth in transmission capacity. This has resulted in a substantial requirement to curtail excess wind power, leading to the loss of a significant proportion (approximately 20 per cent) of potential wind output. To help with this problem, a number of transmission routes are planned, in order to link the wind farms in the interior to load centres on the coast. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether the proposed expansion of the transmission system is adequate to accommodate the future growth of wind. It is also unclear whether the existing pricing systems for electricity itself, and for electricity transmission, reflect the real costs involved. The rapid growth of wind generation has led to a growing deficit in China's renewable energy fund; this in turn is leading to uncertainty over payments to wind farm developers and turbine manufacturers. This paper highlights two options that could help the future development of wind power and its efficient integration into the electricity system: a more coordinated approach to the application of government policy in this area and the development of more market-based price signals in the power sector. Together these could provide a more coherent path towards the overall development of the power system and help secure the optimum contribution from wind power.

The Eleventh Five-Year Plan (between 2006 and 2010) is significant for China's economic development, energy consumption, and CO2 emissions. In 2006, China surpassed the USA to become the world's largest CO2 emitter, which led to widespread discussions about China's role in climate change negotiations. The global financial crisis in 2008 resulted in the one and only downturn in China's exports since 2000. To sustain the country's economic growth, the government made an investment of four trillion Yuan on infrastructure construction and social welfare improvements. In 2009, China became the greatest energy-consuming country in the world. Therefore, it is important to understand the main drivers of China's energy consumption and CO2 emission growth in this period. Using an input–output structural decomposition analysis, this paper analyses the key drivers of China's energy consumption and CO2 emissions growth between 2007 and 2010. The main findings of this research include: Growth in GDP per capita is the largest contributor to the growth of energy consumption and CO2 emissions between 2007 and 2010, while improvements in energy efficiency largely offset this growth; The four trillion Yuan stimulus package was successful in sustaining China's economic growth at a relatively high level during the global financial crisis, but it came at a cost – in terms of soaring energy consumption and CO2 emissions; The economic rebalancing towards a consumption-led economy will need longer to reach fulfilment, as the process of investment-driven economic growth was reinforced during the period between 2007 and 2010; There are positive signals from household consumption during this period, as the share represented by service industries in total household consumption experienced significant growth.

Alongside the thousands of terracotta warriors discovered in the tomb complex of the first emperor of China, were tens of thousands of bronze weapons, including arrowheads and crossbow triggers, lances, spears, halberds (and the ferrules associated with them), swords and a few other special types. This quantity and quality of bronze weaponry provides an extremely rare opportunity to investigate patterns of standardisation and labour organisation within a single, very large and intentional assemblage as well as to consider the role of bronze production during the Qin period (325-206 BC) which marks perhaps the most crucial early stage in Chinese political unification. This thesis draws upon extensive measurements, typological analysis and related statistical treatment, as well as a study of the spatial distribution of those bronze weapons found in the most extensively excavated part of the tomb complex (the five easternmost trenches in Pit 1). Metric data and statistical assessment of inter- and intra-group variation (e.g. coefficients of variation) suggest interesting patterns with regard to relative degrees of standardisation. A combination of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and point pattern analysis are used to assess formally any spatial patterning in the weapons and their analytical attributes, which then also provides further information about the labour organisation behind the production, transportation and placement of weapons as they were moved from the workshop and/or arsenal to the funeral pits. Combining these insights with those obtained from inscriptions found on some of the weapons and from ancient documents, this project investigates what technologies and crafting behaviour affected weapons production and labour organisation in a centralised imperial system. This research project fills a gap in the study of mass production, the behaviour of craftspeople and related logistical organisation in ancient China and to provide empirical data by analysing systematically on the types, dimensions and spatial patterns of Qin bronze weapons in the Emperor Qin Shihuang's tomb complex.

Although building more housing near transit has gained increasing popularity as a strategy for addressing housing unaffordability while promoting sustainability, the effectiveness of this strategy has remained unclear, particularly in auto-oriented metropolises where land use planning authority largely rests with local governments. This article provides an analysis of how parcel-level residential land use intensification takes place under the influence of public transit expansion, with explicit attention to the interactions between current and planned land use changes, in a five-county Southern California region. The analysis using a generalized structural equation modeling approach shows that residential properties are more likely to be densified in transit-rich areas. This tendency is detected not only in the existing high-quality transit areas but also in locations where transit services will be available in the future. It is also found that relaxing zoning restrictions increases the probability of parcel-level densification, and the resultant density increase can induce further zoning or plan changes in nearby areas.

Although building more housing near transit has gained increasing popularity as a strategy for addressing housing unaffordability while promoting sustainability, the effectiveness of this strategy has remained unclear, particularly in auto-oriented metropolises where land use planning authority largely rests with local governments. This article provides an analysis of how parcel-level residential land use intensification takes place under the influence of public transit expansion, with explicit attention to the interactions between current and planned land use changes, in a five-county Southern California region. The analysis using a generalized structural equation modeling approach shows that residential properties are more likely to be densified in transit-rich areas. This tendency is detected not only in the existing high-quality transit areas but also in locations where transit services will be available in the future. It is also found that relaxing zoning restrictions increases the probability of parcel-level densification, and the resultant density increase can induce further zoning or plan changes in nearby areas.

This paper focuses on a special type of remittances — monetary remittances sent by international migrants to their hometowns to build symbolic structures and cultural facilities for collective consumption. We develop an analytical framework to examine the motives behind migrants' remitting behavior and the mechanisms for realizing their remitting objectives based on a comparative study of two emigrant groups from China. We find that the sending of remittances for collective consumption serves as a unique mechanism for social status compensation. Such behavior is not only affected by migrants' socioeconomic circumstances or government policies, but also by intersecting contextual and institutional factors at multiple levels transnationally.

Abstract. Prediction of the landslide development process is always a hot issue in landslide research. So far, many methods for landslide displacement series prediction have been proposed. The support vector machine (SVM) has been proved to be a novel algorithm with good performance. However, the performance strongly depends on the right selection of the parameters (C and γ) of the SVM model. In this study, we present an application of genetic algorithm and support vector machine (GA–SVM) method with parameter optimization in landslide displacement rate prediction. We selected a typical large-scale landslide in a hydro-electrical engineering area of southwest China as a case. On the basis of analyzing the basic characteristics and monitoring data of the landslide, a single-factor GA–SVM model and a multi-factor GA–SVM model of the landslide were built. Moreover, the models were compared with single-factor and multi-factor SVM models of the landslide. The results show that the four models have high prediction accuracies, but the accuracies of GA–SVM models are slightly higher than those of SVM models, and the accuracies of multi-factor models are slightly higher than those of single-factor models for the landslide prediction. The accuracy of the multi-factor GA–SVM models is the highest, with the smallest root mean square error (RMSE) of 0.0009 and the highest relation index (RI) of 0.9992.