Chinese Green Hydrogen Production Potential Development: A Provincial Case Study

Clean and sustainable hydrogen production is key to the establishment of zero-carbon hydrogen energy system in response to the global warming challenge. This paper is aimed to analyze China’s potential of hydrogen production from wind and solar power. To achieve this goal, this paper firstly used the SBM model with undesirable output to measure the efficiency of green hydrogen production at the provincial level. Then, the efficiency of green hydrogen production and the installed capacity of wind and solar power are integrated to construct a comprehensive indicator. Lastly, China’s potential of green hydrogen production from both provincial and regional perspectives are simulated by entropy method and the dynamic change of the potential from 2017 to 2030 is also studied. From the results, we can find that: (1) the efficiency of the hydrogen production from wind power is significantly higher than that of the hydrogen production from solar power; (2) the efficiency and potential of green hydrogen production for each province of China in 2030 are improved compared with that in 2017; (3) the potential of green hydrogen production in the Northwest and North China is significantly higher than other regions; (4) there is a certain inconsistency in the development of the supply side and demand side of hydrogen energy, specially for the Southern China and northwest. Finally, based on the results above, some policy implications are provided to facilitate the high-quality development of the hydrogen energy industry.