ON RENEWABLE ENERGY IN RURAL CHINA - Economics of Sustainable Energy in Agriculture - page 200

4. RURAL RENEWABLE ENERGY
Renewable energy projections are important for developing strategies for
renewable energy in rural China. Long-term projections of renewable
energy in rural China are, however, subject to substantial uncertainties.
Sources of uncertainty include not only economic growth and income
elasticity of energy demand, but also policies for renewable energy. For
our long term projections, we first assume three different cases of income
elasticity and combine these with the same average rate of economic
growth (4.9%) throughout the projection period (Table 14.6); second, we
compare the projected results of the three different cases with that of Li
and Zhang (1998), see Table 14.7. We would like to indicate that the
projections that we make by means of income elasticities are meant to get
an impression of how renewable energy might develop in the future, based
on 'what if' questions. We do not pretend that this approach is perfect and
we would like to stress that both the assumed rate of growth and the
income elasticities may in practice diverge from our assumptions.
In Case 1, by the year 2020 total renewable energy consumption in
rural China is expected to reach 2203 Mtce, which is nearly double to total
energy consumption in China in 1995. The projected results of Case 1 are