Research on the Asymmetric Effect of Fixed-Asset Investment on China’s Primary Energy Production in the Context of Energy Transformation

Under China’s “Dual Carbon” target (DCT), “clean replacement” on the energy supply side and “electric energy replacement” on the energy consumption side are the ways to achieve energy transformation. However, energy projects have a long construction period, complex technology categories, and investment risks that greatly affect the development of energy transformation. Correctly judging the effect of investment changes on primary energy production is of great practical significance to the realization of the DCT. Based on this, NARDL and TVP-SV-VAR models are innovatively used to reveal the nonlinear effect of fixed-asset investment on China’s primary energy production. The results show that the marginal effect of investment growth on coal production is about 1.44 times that of investment reduction. Similarly, the marginal effect of oil and gas investment growth is about 1.21 times that of investment reduction. Due to the influence of resource constraints, China’s traditional fossil energy still has varying degrees of path dependence on the investment-driven development model. For non-fossil energy, investment in hydropower and nuclear power has an inverse correlation with the change in production. Negative marginal efficiency and diseconomies of scale have hindered the development of the hydropower and nuclear power industries. In addition, the asymmetric effect is not yet significant for the short development time and technical constraints of wind and solar power. From the impulse response results, the impact curves of investment in wind and solar power are generally positive, and investment has different degrees of time-delay and time-varying effects on various energy production, which verifies the heterogeneity of investment adjustment mechanisms in different energy industries.