Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategies in Japan and Their Implications in China’s Future Energy Development

This chapter describes energy efficiency and conservation strategies in Japan by showing the historical trends of energy consumption and energy efficiency improvements. The Japanese experience demonstrates that efforts to solve environmental problems have served to improve energy efficiency in various fields. A mitigation scenario to halve global GHG emissions by 2050 is presented, and a comparison is done between effective technologies in Japan and China to achieve the target. Although the model analysis shows that a certain set of technologies can improve energy efficiency by 3 % per year and CO2 intensity with respect to GDP by 3.5 % per year in China by 2050, implementation of the scenario depends on a number of more specific conditions: rates of installation must be achievable; sufficient finance must be mobilised; and barriers to the adoption of low carbon technologies must be overcome. With China’s progress in energy efficiency improvement, there are greater opportunities for the country to take further steps in this area so as to contribute not only to economic development and energy security, but also to global climate stabilisation.