With the deepening of industrialization, energy resources are of strategic importance to China, as they lay the foundation for social and economic development. The energy consumption pushes up the economic cost of the industry, but the enterprises can obtain lots of benefits by utilizing the residual heat. This paper adopts the thermoeconomic cost analysis model, which examines economic factors through thermodynamic analysis, to disclose the relationship between energy consumption and economic

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... rowth in China. In addition, the energy consumption was optimized through a case study on iron and steel enterprises, in light of thermoeconomics. The results show that China's economic growth has linear and nonlinear dynamic correlations with the total energy consumption, coal consumption and oil consumption; the total energy consumption grows at a slower rate than economy, and the energy consumption rate exhibits a declining trend; residual heat recovery and utilization can greatly reduce the level and rate of energy consumption, and enhance the output energy value, thus lowering the thermoeconomic cost. The research findings lay the theoretical basis for the application of thermoeconomic cost in energy consumption analysis.