This study examines whether policy-driven digital transformation is associated with changes in urban electricity consumption in China. Exploiting the implementation of the “Broadband China” policy as a quasi-natural experiment, we employ a Difference-in-Differences framework using panel data for 279 prefecture-level cities over the period 2006–2021. The results indicate that cities selected into the policy exhibit lower levels of electricity consumption and electricity consumption intensity following implementation. In the baseline estimates, treated cities experience an average reduction of approximately 7.1% in electricity consumption, while electricity consumption intensity declines by about 10.3%. We further explore heterogeneity and conditional effects across cities. The estimated association between digital transformation and electricity use is systematically stronger in cities with higher levels of green technology innovation and urbanization, suggesting that local innovative capacity and urban development conditions condition the electricity-related implications of digital infrastructure expansion. In addition, heterogeneity analysis shows that the estimated effects are more pronounced in cities with more advanced digital infrastructure, whereas differences in industrial structure do not yield robustly differential responses within the sample period. Overall, the findings indicate that the electricity-related effects of digital transformation are context-dependent and shaped by complementary local conditions. This study contributes to the empirical literature on digitalization and energy use by providing city-level evidence from a large-scale policy intervention and by highlighting the role of digital infrastructure, innovation activity, and urbanization in conditioning the energy implications of digital transformation.
Wang et al. (2026) studied this question.