Impact analysis of renewable portfolio standard on retail power market considering quota heterogeneity

To promote the development of the renewable energy (RE) industry, China officially implemented renewable portfolio standard (RPS) in 2020, the policy effect of which is closely related to the amount of renewable power offered to users by power-selling enterprises. We use evolutionary game theory to analyze the behavioral strategies of regional governments, regulatory authorities, and power-selling enterprises under RPS, and build a system dynamics (SD) model to determine the influence of the relevant parameters on stakeholders’ strategy making considering quota heterogeneity. The results show that: (1) enterprises evolve to being stable earlier in high-quota area than in low-quota area, which infers that RE development has a certain bottleneck in the initial stage and that RPS can play an effective role; (2) a high certificate price can not only help power selling companies evolve to being stable, but also promote the withdrawal of governments subsidies; (3) to increase the proportion of renewable electricity, the net profit of RE power should not be lower than that of conventional energy; and (4) the incentive effect of subsidy income is not stronger than that of resale income, while when compared with penalty, the incentive effect is stronger, and penalty is not more severe and actually better. Importantly, the results provide policy suggestions for the development of RPS.