The energy sector’s digital evolution is a critical micro-reflection of the digital economy’s architecture and an essential tactical pathway for achieving sustainable development goals. However, the value of digital change in regard to how effectively energy firms’ core business functions is not yet apparent. This research utilizes textual analysis to quantify the textual intensity of energy enterprises’ digitization. Applying data gathered from A-share listed firms in Shanghai and Shenzhen from 2010 to 2021 and based upon the fixed-effects panel model and mediated effects model, we assess the impact of digitization on critical business performance and evaluate the research themes’ variability from business and geographical viewpoints using a full-sample strategy. We derive three notable findings. First, the digital development of energy enterprises significantly improves the performance of their core businesses and exhibits some fluctuating characteristics. Second, the digitization of energy enterprises greatly increases the input and output of enterprise innovation, thereby improving the efficiency of their core business in the two main ways of breakthrough innovation. Third, there is a nonlinear relationship between the performance of energy enterprises’ core businesses and their digital transformation, meaning there is just one threshold consequence that diminishes after crossing the threshold. Digital transformation enables energy companies to carry out cross-border cooperation and integrate innovative resources, thereby improving corporate performance and promoting sustainable development. This paper offers relevant insights for more effective fostering of digital transformation and can help spur enterprises to seek out distinctive and ground-breaking innovation models.

Since its reform and opening up, China’s economy has undergone rapid development and has experienced problems such as the overexploitation of resources and the destruction of the ecological environment. To achieve a balance between economic growth and environmental protection and to follow the sustainable development path, China must implement corresponding environmental regulation policies and vigorously encourage enterprises to pursue green technology innovation. In this paper, environmental regulation is divided into command-and-control, market incentive and voluntary participation. Command-and-control environmental regulation is measured using the entropy method and the logarithm of the pollution discharge fee income in each region is used as the measurement index of market-incentive environmental regulations. At the same time, the logarithm of the number of environmental protection proposals planned by the National People’s Congress and the number of environmental protection proposals planned by the CPPCC is used as the measurement index of voluntary participation in environmental regulations. Based on a regression equation of the effects of environmental regulations on green technology innovation, this paper uses the two-step system GMM method to analyze the panel data of industrial enterprises larger than a designated size in 30 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities in China from 2006 to 2017. Moreover, the paper compares the effects of command-and-control, market-incentive and voluntary participatory environmental regulations on green technology innovation. The empirical results show that command-and-control environmental regulations initially have an inverted U-shaped effect on green technology innovation and market incentive and voluntary participatory environmental regulations have a U-shaped effect on green technology innovation. A comparison of the three environmental regulation policies shows that the effect of command-and-control environmental regulation is more significant.

Due to the increased frequency of extreme weather events and the implementation of the China’s dual-carbon target, thermal power companies have been under pressure to construct green infrastructure and to actively pursue low-carbon transformation in response to stricter environmental regulations. This research thus selects 30 listed thermal power enterprises in China as study objects and assesses their green investment efficiency in the low-carbon transition process using three-stage DEA evaluation model with environmental regulation as an exogenous variable. Based on this, a benchmark regression model is used to corroborate the relationship between environmental regulation and green investment. Simultaneously, we carry out analysis to compare the correlation between thermal power firms’ green investment efficiency and their focus on green investments. The results show in terms of total efficiency that environmental regulation significantly improves the total efficiency of 80% of thermal power enterprises compared to the absence of this exogenous variable. With the addition of environmental regulation, firms’ total efficiency declines gradually in general from 2018 to 2022, with the mean value of efficiency falling by 0.068. In terms of stage-specific efficiency, the efficiency of the green investment stage of the majority of firms is between 0.3 and 0.6, which is much lower than that of the operational stage and the market performance stage. In terms of sub-indicator efficiency, both green investment efficiency and social donation efficiency among thermal power enterprises show obvious polarization, with 30% of them having an efficiency of 1 and 30% less than 0.1. In terms of green investment focus, thermal power unit renovation has a more obvious role in boosting the green investment efficiency of thermal power enterprises than do wind power and photovoltaic projects. Therefore, both governmental departments and thermal power enterprises need to take active measures in order to achieve green transformation from the perspective of green investment efficiency. Through the segmentation of important projects of green investment, this paper provides a reasonable investment direction reference for the sustainable transformation of China’s thermal power industry. It also provides a rich and novel theoretical basis for the Chinese government to further improve the relevant environmental protection laws and regulations of thermal power industry.