Abstract: Under the “dual carbon” strategic goal, cultivating and developing new quality productive forces has become a crucial approach to addressing energy shortages and enhancing green energy efficiency. This paper utilizes fixed-effect model, mediating model, and threshold model to examine the impact of new quality productive forces on green energy efficiency based on provincial panel data from China spanning 2013 to 2022. The findings indicate that the advancement of new quality productive forces effectively empower green energy efficiency, particularly in provinces with high resource dependence, a high level of industrialization, and significant industrial agglomeration. Green technology innovation and digital financial construction are the key mechanisms for new quality productive forces to empower green energy efficiency. Furthermore, it is observed that new quality productive forces exhibit a typical nonlinear effect on green energy efficiency. Specifically, when the level of the digital economy surpasses a certain threshold, the impact of new quality productive forces on improving green energy efficiency follows a nonlinear trajectory characterized by “U” shape of “restrain-hysteresis-excitation”. However, when the degree of environmental regulation exceeds a specific threshold value, its promoting effect demonstrates a nonlinear trend marked by marginal decline.

Key words: new quality productive forces, green energy efficiency, mechanism, nonlinear effect, green technology innovation