The measurement and analysis of the energy-saving potential and CO2 abatement potential index provide decision makers with important information to design environmental regulation and assess its potential impact. If energy and climate policies are not market-based (like in general superior energy/climate taxes or emissions trading schemes), but rather based on command and control approaches, these indices help policy makers to set regulations based on enterprise characteristics, to identify enterprises with more capacity to save energy and cut ineffi- cient emissions, and to allocate proper energy-saving and emissionreduction targets. Similar to Zhou et al. (2010)'s claim, small-sized, non-SOE power enterprises beyond the top-1000 enterprise program in 11th FYP should be included in future initiatives as they have a relatively greater space to eliminate inefficient energy utilization and associated CO2 emissions. Actually some provinces, i.e., Guangdong in the 11th FYP, had designed a similar top-1000 program and extended the program to a wider scope of enterprise. Also the central government formulated in the 12th FYP another “Top-10,000 Enterprise Energy Conservation Action”, which can be seen as a ramp up of the “Top-1000 program”. It will cover around 17,000 enterprises with annual energy consumption excess 5000 tce. Nevertheless, policy implications have to be drawn very cautiously as our study faces important limitations. For example, the lack of information on generators and boilers prevents us from examining the effect of technology differences on abatement potentials which might play an important role.