Abstract: China's renewable energy development has faced several challenges, including high costs, excess capacity and difficulties with grid integration. Government intervention is required to address these issues promptly as they arise. However, due to disparities in resource endowments and industrial structures across regions, local governments have different policy preferences. Therefore, it is crucial to systematically evaluate the impact of these preferences on renewable energy development. This paper uses city-level data from China, covering the period from 2006 to 2022, and applies text mining methods to identify government policy preferences based on linguistic characteristics in local government work reports. It also estimates city-level electricity generation from renewable energy based on installed capacity data, and calculates renewable electricity consumption by the inputs and outputs of electricity from energy balance sheets. Based on this, this study uses a two-way fixed effects model to systematically evaluate the impact of government policy preferences on renewable energy development from the perspectives of both supply and demand. The empirical results demonstrate that government policy preferences significantly increase the generation and consumption of renewable electricity, with generation and consumption increasing by 4.170% and 2.154%, respectively. However, this positive effect only occurs when the government shows proactive preferences that exceed fundamental expectations. Furthermore, the impact of policy preferences significantly varies across different city types. Further analysis indicates that officials' personal experiences do not significantly enhance the effect of government policy preferences. However, the positive effect of policy preferences on renewable electricity consumption is significantly strengthened under the influence of promotion incentives. By revealing the crucial role of government policy preferences in promoting renewable energy development, this study provides central and local governments with a useful reference for formulating more targeted and effective energy transition policies.

Key words: Preference, Renewable Energy, Electricity, Supply side, Demand side