Volume 33: CCUS Technologies for the Carbon Neutrality: Part I

Research on Incentive Measures of CCUS Power Plant under Evolutionary Game Theory Shuangqi Song, Shuanglin Song, Jian Guo

Abstract

As the power and heating industry is the sector with the largest incremental CO2 emissions globally, CCUS retrofitting by power companies is important to achieve the national carbon dioxide emission reduction macro policy. With the aim of exploring the interaction and choice of strategy between government, public and coal plants and to further explore the influence of incentives on coal plant behaviour so as to realize investment in CCUS retrofitting by coal plants, in this paper, we take the government, the public, and coal plants as three stakeholders, constructs the game model, construct the payoff matrix based on evolutionary game theory, calculate the replicator dynamics equations of each stakeholders, and the evolutionary stabilization strategy of the system is analyzed. In addition, this paper establishes the SD simulation model according to the concept of system dynamics, simulates the behavior evolution path of three stakeholders using Vensim software, and conducts sensitivity analyses on incentive policies and key parameters. The results show that: (1) There exists a stabilization strategy in the evolutionary game model, i.e., both the government and the public choose not to regulate and coal plants choose to invest in CCUS; (2) For China’s current domestic context in which only a carbon trading market exists, China has a significant advantage in the imposition of a carbon tax, which has a great motivator for coal plants to choose to invest in CCUS; (3) In terms of energy policy, the government can motivate coal plants to invest early in CCUS retrofits in order to implement carbon dioxide emission reduction technologies by increasing tariff subsidies for clean electricity; (4) By increasing penalties, the government can also motivate coal plants to invest in CCUS retrofits to promote the deploy CCUS.

Keywords coal plants, CCUS, evolutionary game, system dynamics