Does the Application of Industrial Robots Enhance Urban Energy Resilience? Evidence from China

Abstract

Against the backdrop of the in-depth adjustment of the global energy pattern and the accelerated advancement of the energy transition, coupled with the frequent occurrence of extreme climate events and the continuous intensification of risks such as supply fluctuations and external shocks faced by urban energy systems, improving urban energy resilience has become a core measure for all countries to address the vulnerability of energy systems and promote urban sustainable development. As a core technical carrier of intelligent manufacturing, the enabling role of industrial robots (IRs) in enhancing urban energy resilience (UER) has also become an important research topic in the field of the energy economy. This paper takes 280 prefecture-level and above cities in China from 2009 to 2023 as research samples and empirically examines their impact effects by constructing a Double Machine Learning (DML) model, transmission mechanism, and moderating effect of IRs on UER and ensures the reliability of conclusions through various robustness tests. The research findings indicate that IRs significantly promote the improvement of UER; industrial structure upgrading and green technology innovation are the main mediating paths, verifying how IRs affect UER from two different aspects and both environmental regulation (ER) and science expenditure (SE) positively moderate the promoting effect of IRs on UER, with the coefficients of the interaction terms being significantly positive. Robustness tests show that the core conclusions are highly reliable. This study fills the research gap in the transmission mechanism between IRs and UER and provides empirical evidence for the formulation of relevant policies. Accordingly, it is proposed that governments should strengthen the policy support for the application of industrial robots in high-energy-consuming industries, optimize the synergy mechanism between environmental regulation and scientific and technological expenditure, guide the deep integration of industrial robots with industrial structure upgrading and green technology innovation, and formulate differentiated promotion strategies based on regional energy resilience characteristics and industrial development foundations, so as to fully release the energy-resilience-improvement effect of industrial robots.