China’s Energy Structure Transition Toward Carbon Neutrality: Carbon Emission Characteristics, Bottleneck Constraints and Prospects

Against the backdrop of escalating global climate change and energy security pressures, promoting a low-carbon transformation of the energy structure has become a crucial pathway to achieving sustainable development. China is currently at a critical stage of synergistically advancing economic development, energy security, and carbon emission reduction targets. This paper reviews the evolution of China's energy supply and demand structure in recent years and further explores the main constraints of energy structure, technological innovation, and grid absorption capacity on the low-carbon energy transition. Research shows that China's energy structure is gradually shifting towards a low-carbon direction, with the proportion of fossil fuel supply and consumption continuing to decline, carbon emissions from some key industrial sectors stabilizing or decreasing, and positive progress being made in energy electrification and new energy development. However, resource constraints, key technological bottlenecks, and insufficient grid absorption capacity for high proportions of new energy remain significant factors hindering the energy transition. In the future, China's energy system will further develop towards zero-carbon supply, electrified consumption, distributed energy storage, and intelligent dispatch. Accelerating breakthroughs in key technologies such as hydrogen energy, advanced energy storage, and carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) is essential to support the achievement of carbon neutrality goals.