Abstract: To explore the causes for the sharp decline of unit GDP power consumption in Hunan Province, the paper improves the accounting method for the industrial structure rationality evaluating indicators, and synthetizes the Theil index. A generalized additive model is established to study the impact mechanism and impact intensity of Hunan province’s industrial structure rationality, the energy consumption structure and technological progress on the intensity of the power consumption. The empirical results show that the rationality of industrial structure has significant and non-monotonic influence on the power consumption intensity, and the technological progress has significant and monotonic influence on the unit value-added power consumption, while the energy consumption structure has insignificant influence on the unit GDP power consumption. To verify the universality of the conclusions, the author further studies six provinces in central China, and all the results are consistent and strongly proves the correctness of the conclusions.

Key words: unit GDP power consumption, industrial structure rationality, energy consumption structure, technological progress