To obtain the early realization of carbon peak and carbon neutrality in China, this study explores the cooperative relationship of inter-regional energy power-generation substitution between regions dominated by traditional thermal power and renewable energy sources (RES). By taking a regional government as the decision-making subject, focused on interest and environmental factors, an evolutionary game model of inter-regional energy cooperation is structured, and a simulation platform of the two different power-generation replacement cooperative patterns/strategies is constructed by using system dynamics. Then, the influences of the sensitive parameters on the cooperative evolutionary path under symmetric and asymmetric sharing cost cases have been discussed based on practical example in the regions of China. The results imply that agents can only select the favorable cooperative strategies unilaterally, by choosing a strategy of sharing the environmental revenues rather than the cooperative costs. When the failure cost of the opportunity revenues is less than or equal to the RES power-generation cost, a traditional thermal power regional government adopts a cooperative no-sharing strategy, while an RES regional government selects the opposite strategy. However, under the optimized dynamic proportional allocation schema, it is more likely that the traditional thermal power regional government will prefer cooperative sharing strategies, which can promote the social value of RES. This study provides beneficial inspiration for the Chinese government to further improve its RPS policy. The RES consumption fulfilled by direct or indirect trans-regional energy cooperation can be included in the RPS index framework assigned to traditional thermal power energy regions, and the added environmental value should be regarded as being as crucial as the economic and energy factors are in the cooperative process. In addition, RES regions that contribute more to clean energy absorption should raise the weight of the RPS rewards.

To address water sustainability challenges, this study investigates how public water concern influences corporate water responsibility (CWR) and how managerial green cognition moderates this relationship. Drawing on institutional theory and cognitive theory, we analyze a panel of 1292 publicly listed high-water-consuming firms in China from 2015 to 2024. The results show that public water concern significantly improves CWR by increasing legitimacy pressure, while its effect through government water governance attention is not statistically significant. Furthermore, managerial green cognition—including both economic and moral dimensions—positively moderates this relationship. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the moderating effect is stronger in firms with more female directors, older executives, and internationally experienced teams. These findings contribute to refining institutional theory in the context of environmental responsibility and highlight the critical role of executive cognition and demographic structure in corporate sustainability behavior.

To boost the sustainable development of energy and the environment, a new power system with clean energy sources has been proposed by the Chinese government and traditional coal-fired power units are being transformed into regulation service providers for this new energy power system. Then, in this study, complementary power generation cooperation between traditional coal-fired power and new energy power producers is analyzed and discussed, and the energy quota agents, power sellers, are also included. Based on the cooperation game idea, different decision-making models of the tripartite power entities are elaborately constructed. Then, according to the price linkage mechanism between new energy and traditional thermal power, the profit of all power subjects is calculated and the profit allocation process is also analyzed. The conclusions show that the similarity of the two wholesale power price coefficients verifies the symmetry of the cooperative status of power producers. For BPC and SPC quota patterns, for example, BPC is bundled with new energy power and green certificates, whereas SPC is separate. Under the SPC pattern, there is a critical value for effective cooperation between the two power producers in the price range of traditional thermal power or new energy, which can achieve a win–win situation of increasing economic benefits and the consumption scale. Under the BPC pattern, the dynamic benefit compensation mechanism, which is the corrected Shapley value based on the RPS quota ratio, can solve the compressed profit of traditional coal-fired power producers. In contrast, the overall effect of profit allocation using the nucleolar method is not ideal. This study aims to give full play to the elastic induction effect of RPS to promote the sustainable transformation of traditional thermal power energy, especially combining the market mechanism to encourage traditional coal-fired power units to improve green technology to advance the construction of the green power market in China.