The 2024-25 action plan for energy conservation and carbon reduction recently issued by the State Council, China's Cabinet, will lubricate China's efforts to promote industrial upgrading and high-quality economic and social development.

Green and low-carbon development is one of China's major new development concepts and also an important task for promoting high-quality development. Given that the top authorities explicitly require the country to control total energy consumption and intensity, and especially control fossil energy consumption, the plan puts forward the goals and tasks of energy conservation and carbon reduction in the remaining two years of the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25) period, in a bid to develop green and low-carbon new quality productive forces, change the traditional extensive growth mode, and improve the total factor productivity, to promote high-quality economic development.

The plan focuses on promoting the transformation of China's energy supply structure by optimizing its energy consumption structure, vowing greater efforts to boost clean energy consumption and raising the proportion of nonfossil energy consumption to about 18.9 percent and 20 percent of the country's total energy consumption by the end of 2024 and 2025 respectively. In order to achieve the target, it offers alternative actions to reduce fossil energy consumption.

On the supply side, the plan requires that the country increase the development of nonfossil energy, saying by the end of 2025, the proportion of nonfossil energy generation will be raised to about 39 percent. It also requires boosting the consumption capacity of renewable energy on the consumption side. To this end, systematic reforms should be carried out to unblock the circulation of nonfossil energy, including accelerating the construction of delivery channels for large-scale wind power and photovoltaic bases to improve cross-regional power transmission capacity.

The plan also requires improvement in the electrification level of bus stations, railways, airports, etc, the strengthening of charging infrastructure construction, the gradual elimination of restrictions on the purchase of new energy vehicles, and the popularized electrification of vehicles in the public sector. It can be seen that the government hopes to promote the production and consumption of nonfossil energy by deepening the reform of the power system.

Energy saving and carbon reduction in various sectors is a process of eliminating backward production capacity and promoting industrial transformation and upgrading. Its combination with large-scale equipment renewal and the replacement of old consumer goods for new can promote relevant industries to invest in advanced technology and equipment, improve production efficiency, and drive investment and consumption, thus promoting China's high-quality economic development.