China’s New Distributed Solar PV Policies To Boost Distributed Solar To 35% Market Share, Report Finds

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China’s been busy in the solar power area, and a number of Distributed PV Power Generation policies have been announced over the past few months.

Chinese Distributed PV Power Generation

More Solar Panels Can’t Be A Bad Thing, Right?

The Chinese government has set a goal of 5 GW of distributed PV power generation per year, which it hopes to meet by 2016. Meeting this goal would accelerate market growth and reduce energy consumption and cost considerably. However, a number of factors stand in the way.

European investigations against Chinese PV manufacturers regarding dumping and subsidies are one factor. Another issue that has cropped up is a number of quality-related problems, and yet another is delays in starting construction of projects that have already been approved. In all cases, project developers are trying to start out as cheaply as possible.

But How To Get Them…

A potential solution — or at least a way to get the market on track for growth — is to offer performance-based rebates. Distributed PV-generated electricity is already cheaper in most areas of China than both industrial and commercial prices, and a performance rebate could increase that competitiveness.
 


 
Another way to tackle the issue of slow growth is to try to avoid some of the infamous Chinese bureaucratic red tape. The State Grid has a new “Welcome, Support and Service” idea that basically involves not charging for eligible Distributed PV projects. “According to new research to be featured within the forthcoming NPD Solarbuzz China Balance-Of-Systems Report, this would reduce system cost by 5%-10%,” SolarBuzz reports.

This is projected to boost distributed growth considerably. “The growth rate of distributed PV power generation in China during 2013 is projected to exceed 90% and to continue over the next few years. In fact, the pipeline of projects within the Golden Sun program and Solar Rooftop programs will contribute more than 2.5 GW during 2013. Under this forecast scenario, the market share for distributed PV power generation would exceed 35% during 2013.”

Overall, China’s PV market is poised for staggering growth — but whether or not it actually achieves that growth seems to depend on whether or not it can make a decent product and then not bury it in red tape.

Source: SolarBuzz
Image Source: Wikimedia Commons





  • Sean

    why, if they are having trouble selling the panels abroad, dont they sell/give/install them on every roof in china. grow/subsidise an industry in bad time, cut your energy import bill, cut pollution from coal power plants.
    it is a totalitarian state. you can do this.

    • Bob_Wallace

      China has increased their solar goal by 4x recently. They went from a plan of having 5 GWs on line by 2015 to having 21 GWs on line by 2015.

      The price of solar is falling so fast that I think we’ll see a lot of the surplus sucked up fairly fast. India is likely to be a big installer. They currently use a lot of diesel which is an expensive way to generate electricity. They can save significant money by installing solar and turning off the generators when the Sun is shining.

      We’re still going to see a lot of solar manufacturers fail. The most efficient can increase their production, generally making their product even cheaper to produce, and the less efficient get forced out.

  • Rahul

    There is a similar sort of situation in India. Specifically India more concentrated on the Single place Utility Scale plants. But now India has released a new set of Policies the JNNSM Phase – 2 (http://www.renewindians.com/2012/12/mnre-releases-jnnsm-phase-2-draft.html) to be precise to tackle this issue. This Phase plans to install more distributed PV systems and also more Offgrid systems too.

    • http://zacharyshahan.com/ Zachary Shahan

      thanks. yeah, just included that in a news roundup. good to see.