Impact of Industrialization on China’s Regional Energy Security in the New Era

Ensuring industrialization and energy security in a positive direction at the same time is significant to achieve high-quality development of the regional economy. This study attempts to provide two evaluation index systems for industrialization and energy security in the new era and discuss the impact of industrialization on energy security in the new era. In doing so, industrialization in the new era is evaluated by the ratio of quality expansion and quantity improvement during industrial development, then the evaluation system of energy security is put forward which has a total of 18 indexes in three dimensions, including energy supply security, energy consumption security, and energy supply-demand matching security. Entropy weight is used to evaluate industrialization and energy security levels of 30 provinces in China, then we compare respectively the changes of industrialization and energy security before and after the new era. Next, we examine the impact of industrialization on energy security in the new era for 30 provinces in China during the period from 2008 to 2017 by using the panel Tobit model. The study shows that: in the new era, the industrialization is pursuing high-quality development at a faster pace but energy security is threatened by deteriorated supply-demand matching security; there is an positive relationship between industrialization and energy security, and also supply security and consumption security,but the positive relationship between industrialization and matching security is not statistically significant; GDP per capita can inhibit energy security, green technology efficiency and the ratio of capital to labor will improve energy security. Finally, some suggestions are put forward from four aspects: building an environment-friendly development model, encouraging green technological innovation, optimizing the input structure of factors, and building a dynamic balance of energy supply and demand.