Improving energy utilization efficiency is a crucial means to achieve energy conservation, emission reduction, and green development. At present, to establish a high-quality development framework and satisfy the growing need for a better life among all its people, China must steadfastly pursue the path of green development. Although China’s substantial economic scale and achievements in ecological civilization construction provide favorable conditions for green transformation, there remains a significant gap compared to developed countries in the application of green and clean technologies. Confronted with technological bottlenecks, leveraging emerging technologies such as industrial robots from the new round of scientific and technological revolutions to improve the green total factor energy efficiency (GTFEE) is of critical importance to China’s green development. This study explores the potential impact of industrial robots on enhancing China’s GTFEE. It begins by reviewing the current research landscape in this field, highlighting its shortcomings, and theorizing potential impact pathways of industrial robots. Subsequently, the paper analyzes data from 2010 to 2019 on the usage of industrial robots and GTFEE across 276 cities at the prefectural level or above in China. Through empirical regression models that incorporate control variables and interaction terms, the study investigates the specific impacts of industrial robots on energy efficiency and their mechanisms of action. The results indicate that industrial robots significantly enhance the GTFEE of Chinese cities, especially in the Northeastern region. Industrial robots notably improve the GTFEE in resource-based cities, old industrial bases, and low-carbon pilot cities. Additionally, robots indirectly boost GTFEE by increasing labor productivity. Enhanced levels of green innovation and environmental regulations also positively moderate the effectiveness of industrial robots in improving energy efficiency. The findings of this research can assist local government agencies in coordinating and implementing policies that are conducive to green development, making better use of industrial robots to serve the people, and are of significant importance for promoting the transformation of China’s economy and society towards high-quality development.

ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) performance is increasingly viewed as a strategic factor shaping firms’ innovation activities. However, existing studies have largely examined green innovation as a whole, with limited attention to low-carbon technological innovation as a distinct domain and insufficient understanding of its driving mechanisms and conditional heterogeneity. Using panel data on Chinese A-share listed companies from 2009 to 2024, this study employs a two-way fixed-effects framework to examine the effect of ESG performance on low-carbon technological innovation, and further investigates the underlying transmission mechanisms and heterogeneous effects. The results show that ESG significantly promotes low-carbon technological innovation, with a notably stronger effect on substantive innovation than on strategic innovation, indicating that ESG drives genuine technological advancement rather than superficial patent accumulation. Mechanism tests reveal that ESG facilitates innovation by easing financing constraints and enhancing government support. At the dimensional level, the environmental and social pillars exert significant positive effects, whereas the governance pillar does not. Heterogeneity analyses demonstrate that the promotional effect is more pronounced in state-owned enterprises, large firms, heavily polluting industries, and non-technology-intensive firms, revealing structural variation across firm characteristics. By isolating low-carbon innovation from the broader green innovation concept and identifying dual transmission channels, this study extends the literature on the economic consequences of ESG and provides evidence for designing differentiated green governance policies.