Research on Production Efficiency of China's Power Systems from the Perspective of Network Structure

Power systems play an important role in China’s energy security strategy. It is of great significance for high-quality social and economic development to comprehensively evaluate the production efficiency of power systems and their divisions in power generation, transmission, and distribution. This article adopts the data envelopment analysis (DEA) method to analyze the production efficiency of China’s power systems from 2014 to 2017. Compared with traditional DEA models, the network DEA model employs the link variables such as the on-grid electricity and distributed electricity to model the internal connections of a power system and explore the internal factors of system inefficiency. The results show that obvious regional differences in the production efficiency exist among China’s power systems, and the new round of power system reform has promoted the power system development. The heterogeneous characteristics of the external environment lead to different development paths for power systems in various regions. The effects of the policies aiming to improve the production performance are heavily dependent on the actual situations and environment where the power system locates.