Mike Thomas

Leo Lester

This book provides a concise introduction to China’s electricity sector, suitable for university students and business analysts. It is business focused, combining an introduction from an established regional electricity consultancy with five academic chapters covering governance, market stakeholders and reform, wind and solar power, environmental regulation, and developments in financing. It is written in an accessible but rigorous style for people with limited knowledge of the topic, with minimal jargon but full referencing throughout the academic chapters. Each academic chapter starts with a summary and three key points to guide the reader’s understanding.

China’s Electricity Sector

This volume goes beyond a conventional analysis of Asia’s energy relationships and explores the premise that energy relations in Asia in the 21st century should reinforce mutual interdependence. Conventional analyses of international energy relations stress the asymmetric nature of the risks and costs of disruptions to energy flows. Energy suppliers (net exporters) are concerned with the cost of a buyer looking elsewhere; energy consumers (net importers) are preoccupied with the costs associated with an interruption of supply. This perspective reflects the current transactional nature of energy relations and is clearly observed in the energy dynamics between countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and the economies of Northeast Asia (NEA). As the economies of both the GCC and NEA have enlarged there is under-recognized potential for a move away from narrow transactional relations to broader, interdependent ones. This collection of essays from leading energy, strategic, and economic policy think tanks focused on how energy relations are forming in the 21st century offers energy scholars and policy makers answers to what these increasingly close relationships mean for international politics and trade.

Leo Lester

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