Is energy utilization among Chinese provinces sustainable?

With the advent of China's reformation and open policy, its economy and levels of urbanization experienced explosive growth. However, the widely employed “high input, high pollution” style of resource consumption violates the green growth principle, and is imposing increasing pressure on both the energy infrastructure and the environment. Due to the complex relationships between resources, energy, urbanization, and the environment, it is imperative to explore methods that maximize total-factor energy efficiency and reduce environmental pollution, to achieve green growth. The slack-based measure (SBM) of efficiency was used to evaluate the total-factor energy efficiencies of 29 Chinese provinces for specific periods. Further, we leveraged the Malmquist index to explore efficiency trends from 2005 to 2014. The results show that urbanization and energy efficiency are positively correlated, whereas decreasing ratings in some provinces indicate economic recession or severe environmental pollution. Almost two-thirds of the measured provinces are energy inefficient, but have shown slow but clear improvement, indicating the huge potential for growth. Based on the findings, Chinese provinces are allocated to three categories, and policy recommendations and implementation measures are discussed, for improving total-factor energy efficiency nationwide.