The transformation of the power sector toward renewable energy is crucial for achieving China's carbon neutrality goals and mitigating global climate change. However, the construction phase of power infrastructure generates substantial embodied carbon emissions. This study focuses on Fujian Province, a strategic hub for clean energy development along China's southeastern coast, to quantify and project these emissions. Using an environmentally extended input–output model, we quantify cumulative embodied carbon emissions from all economic activities associated with power infrastructure construction in Fujian over 2011–2022. A Random Forest machine learning model is then used to forecast future embodied carbon emissions under three climate change scenarios for 2023–2060. Results show that cumulative embodied carbon emissions from power infrastructure construction increased from 8.63 million tons in 2011 to 337 million tons over 2011–2022. Among generation technologies, nuclear power exhibited the highest embodied carbon intensity per unit of installed capacity after 2016, while solar photovoltaics consistently maintained the lowest values. Over 2023–2060, cumulative embodied carbon emissions are projected to reach 6.79 billion tons under the carbon neutrality scenario. Based on these results, policy recommendations are proposed from technical, economic and regulatory perspectives to mitigate construction-phase embodied emissions. These findings highlight the importance of detailed construction-phase embodied carbon assessment and provide a scalable analytical framework for forecasting and mitigating emissions in power infrastructure transitions. • Quantifying the embodied carbon emissions from power generation and transmission projects. • Embodied carbon emissions under climate change scenarios are predicted via random forest machine learning. • Fujian's power infrastructure construction induced 337 million tons embodied carbon emissions from 2011 to 2022. • Wind and Nuclear power installations contributed the highest embodied carbon emissions. • 6.79 billion tons extra embodied carbon emissions will generate under carbon neutrality target.
Ge et al. (Mon,) studied this question.