Urban Energy Transition During Climate-Smart Technology Diffusion: Stage-Dependent Evidence from 282 Chinese Cities

Urban energy transition requires the deployment of clean energy alongside technologies that lower the carbon intensity of urban economic activity. Yet the effect of climate-smart technology may change with the stage of technology diffusion. Using city-level data from 282 Chinese cities between 2010 and 2019, this study uses carbon emission intensity as an inverse indicator of urban energy transition, and tests whether climate-smart technology affects it linearly or in a stage-dependent manner. This study employs a fixed-effects specification, supplemented by exploratory channel and heterogeneity analyses. The results show a stage-dependent relationship with a turning point of 3.35, which lies 0.44 standard deviations below the mean. This indicates that while climate-smart technology constrains urban energy transition at low levels, it can facilitate transition once past this threshold, and positive effects prevail for most observations in our sample. The channel analyses suggest that energy intensity and climate attention may represent potential pathways associated with this shift. The heterogeneity results show that the non-linear pattern is more evident in non-resource-dependent cities and in cities excluded from the “Broadband China” pilot programme. These findings suggest that climate-smart technology supports the energy transition when digital diffusion is coordinated with energy efficiency improvements, cleaner infrastructure operations, and more precise environmental governance.