Research on the Impact of Power Industry Agglomeration on the Development of Energy Industry—Empirical Evidence From China's Provincial Panel

ABSTRACT Under the background of Global Climate Governance and “double carbon” goals, power industry agglomeration is an important path to promote the development of energy industry, and its mechanism and impact effect need to be further explored. Based on the panel data of 30 provinces in China from 2001 to 2021, this paper constructs a two‐dimensional index (TLQ) by improving the location entropy method to measure the level of power industry agglomeration, and empirically tests its nonlinear impact and spatial spillover effect on the development of China's energy industry by using the spatial Durbin model (SDM). The results show that: (1) China's power industry has formed significant agglomeration characteristics, and the TLQ value of 23 provinces is more than 1, showing regional differences in agglomeration level; (2) The optimal agglomeration level is 1.158, and the marginal benefit decreases when it exceeds the threshold; (3) The spatial effect analysis shows that the power industry agglomeration in adjacent areas has a positive spillover effect on the energy transformation in the region, and the spatial linkage effect of fiscal expenditure, resource endowment and other control variables is significant; (4) The heterogeneity test shows that the demand for power industry agglomeration in underdeveloped regions is more urgent, and its optimal agglomeration level (1.325) is higher than that in developed regions (1.176). Based on this, this paper suggests that the government should guide the layout of the power industry in a differentiated way, optimize the scale of agglomeration, and strengthen cross‐regional collaboration, so as to give full play to the positive role of agglomeration effect in the transformation of energy structure and help achieve the goal of “double carbon” with high quality.