Abstract: Under mounting pressures of increasingly stringent resource constraints, severe environmental pollution, and ecosystem degradation, ecological overload and sluggish growth caused by resource misallocation have emerged as critical bottlenecks constraining the development of new quality productive force. This paper, focusing on the key issues of empowering the green foundation of new quality productivity forces, constructs an analytical framework for the coupling and coordination of the Energy-Environment-Economy (3E) system under sustainable development goals, and examines the nonlinear impact of China’s 3E system coupling on Green Total Factor Productivity (GTFP) via spatiotemporal dimension. The results indicate that China’s 3E system exhibits a developmental pattern characterized primarily by “intermediate coordination with notable gradient transition”. When the coupling coordination degree surpasses the critical threshold (0.8424) and enters the “well-coordinated” stage, technological progress becomes the primary driver of GTFP growth, with its marginal contribution to GTFP increasing by 42.4%. Furthermore, regional heterogeneity reveals that coastal regions leverage institutional dividends to achieve a manifold increase in GTFP. In contrast, inland regions are constrained by path dependency, limiting their growth potential. The central regions, however, exhibit a “double threshold” effect. These findings provide a basis for policymaking and offer policy implications for building a regional collaborative governance system, addressing resource misallocation, and accelerating the leapfrog development of new quality productive forces.

Key words: new energy system, energy-environment-economy system, green total factor productivity, nonlinearity