Currently, air pollution becomes a wide-concerned global environmental problem. In Shandong Province of North China, the air quality deterioration has greatly restricted the development of society and threatened human health. In this study, air quality index (AQI) and 6 pollutants monitored in 2019 are analyzed associated with socioeconomic factors, aiming to identify the characteristics and driving factors of air pollution. Our results show that great seasonality and spatial heterogeneity exists for AQI and pollutants. The variation patterns result from mechanisms of pollutants formation, and are mainly dependent on the coal burning-dominated energy production and climatic periodicity. Correlation analysis shows that AQI decreases with the increase of factors of city size, resource and energy consumption, transportation and economy, but is weakly related to population. The ratio of energy supply for different purpose also influences the air pollutants. The increased proportion of electric supply for productive use will result in anabatic pollution caused by particle matters, oxynitrate and oxysulfide. This study provides useful information for the better control of air pollution and insights for the making of environmental-friendly strategies for energy supply.