Energy efficiency strategy as environmental policy: 20 years of “free lunch” lessons

The remarkable growth success of more than a decade has placed China´s energy needs at the top of power project developers´ priority list and has put China´s environmental needs at the forefront of global concern. Nearly all of the important environmental issues in China face a growth-versus-environment or budget-versus-environment trade-off. Such is not generally the case with energy efficiency policies. Since nearly any use of energy has environmental effects, the two issues are intimately linked. The author focuses on the subject of energy efficiency, which can be broadly defined to include the technical solutions available to energy users to reduce demands as well as the coordinated actions available to producers and consumers to maximize the efficiency of production and use