Simulating policy interventions for different quota targets of renewable portfolio standard: A combination of evolutionary game and system dynamics approach

The renewable portfolio standard (RPS) is one of the most important policies for China's goals of emission peak and carbon neutralization. Central to advancing RPS is to ensure that stakeholders have the willingness to undertake their respective obligations. As a common instrument for pushing policy forward, policy interventions are frequently used by authorities to motivate and restrain the behaviors of stakeholders. However, it is still unclear how policy interventions under different quota targets affect the behavior strategies of stakeholders involved in RPS. Thus, this paper develops an evolutionary game model considering power sales companies (PSC) and power generation companies (PGC) as the participants. Based on official Chinese statistics and data from previous studies, we employ system dynamics to investigate the impacts of single and dual policy interventions under three quota targets on participants’ behavior strategies. The results indicate that, the evolutionary game always converges to the same evolutionary stable strategy for different initial strategies, and PGC are not as sensitive to quota targets as PSC. In addition, reward or penalty as single policy intervention has diverse impacts on participants, and PSC and PGC behave differently under all the combinations of dual policy interventions. To achieve desired policy goals, government should not only adopt policy interventions according to the stages of RPS implementation and in combination with other policy instruments, but also encourage stakeholders to consciously undertake their respective quota obligations.