Analysis of the Impact of the Digital Economy on Energy Structure

This paper presents an analysis of the impact of the digital economy on energy structure on the basis of the provincial panel data of China which covers the years from 2014 to 2022. We adopt an individual fixed effects model to empirically analyze the relationship between the digital economy and the regional energy structure. The results show that: First, the digital economy has significantly promoted the transformation of the energy structure. Additionally, this conclusion still stands through a sequence of robustness tests. Second, the nonlinear test shows that the impact of the digital economy on the optimization of the energy structure has a significant inverted “U”-shaped relationship of “increasing first and then decreasing”. Third, technological innovation plays a significant mediating role in the process of the digital economy's impact on energy structure.