The modern economic growth paradigm relies heavily on natural endowments. Renewable energy as a permanent energy source has the potential to reduce the ecological footprint. We adopt the Vector Autoregressive model to examine the impact of renewable energy consumption on the energy ecological footprint and use the quantile regression method to test the heterogeneity and asymmetry between energy ecological footprint and photovoltaic, wind energy, and biomass energy. The results show that renewable energy has a long-term negative impact on the ecological footprint, and for every 1% increase in renewable energy consumption, the energy ecological footprint will decrease by 2.91%. The contribution of renewable energy consumption to reducing the ecological footprint is 1.34% on average. There is no two-way Granger causality between renewable energy consumption and energy ecological footprint. The reduction effect of wind energy consumption on the energy ecological footprint varies the most, followed by biomass energy and photovoltaic. In addition, under different energy ecological footprint distribution conditions, the impact of photovoltaic or wind energy or biomass energy consumption on the energy ecological footprint is different.
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