A full understand of the influential mechanism concerning electricity consumption has a crucial political reference significance for the implementation of energy conservation and consumption reduction policies. To solve the lack of correlation between the empirical results of the research regions in present researches, this paper takes China's electricity consumption from 1995 to 2016 as the research subject, uses Multi-period ST-LMDI model by setting a unified reference province as a benchmark for different regions in China to completely decompose the changes in China's electricity consumption, and further analyzes the influence mechanism of China's electricity consumption changes by combining the characteristics of the departments and regions. As the result, it's found that the economic growth has a strong impetus for power consumption while the technological progress can effectively curb it. Meanwhile, results of studying electricity consumption from the perspective of industry and region show that the economic structure and consumption intensity have obviously different influences in the eastern, central and western regions. So when it comes to formulate the policy for electricity development and reform, the characteristics of industrial structure as well as the regional differences must be taken into consideration. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.