Days shortly after the conclusions of National People’s congress in Beijing, China’s leading energy regulator, the NEA (national energy administration), declared the official solar OV installation target of 17.GW for 2015, hence replacing a target of 15GW communicated through a draft circular previously in late January. The target of 17.5GW is not just twenty percentages more than the tentative 15GW target, but also more than the 2014s 14GW target by 27%. This quite aggressive target of 17.8GW indicates the determination of regulator to install solar power all over the country. Considering the 17.8GW will certainly be introduced, by the end of 2015, China would subsequently become abode to 45GW of deployed PV capacity, thus exceeding not just its 35GW target by a fine thirty percentages, but also overtaking the pole position of Germany by means of deployed capacity that could amount to approximately 37.6GW at the end of 2014, thereby becoming the country with the world’s biggest installed solar power generation capacity.
Utility Vs distributed:
One surprise thing about 17.8GW is that it will no more devise particular target for either distributed generation or utility scale. This diverges from the former policy line of plainly promoting distributed generation of government, though it has been on crest of the political agenda right from August 2013. Developing grid curtailments particularly in the provinces of West China because of a fairly undeveloped grid infrastructure, long distance transmission lines or reduced local power consumption under construction made the government to support distributed generation under its objective on-site consumption and on-site generation, concentrating on commercial and industrial rooftop applications. As opposing to this backdrop, a full of 1823MW of distributed demonstration projects were scheduled and approved to be coming up in 18 designed development and industrial areas by the end of 2015. But, inspite of these efforts, successes ran short of planned targets: out of 10.95GW deployed in 2013, 800MW were just regarded distributed generation and out of 8GW target last year for distributed generation, only 2.05GW were realized.
The official target notification 2015 however does motivate local government while elaborating their corresponding local construction techniques to prioritize projects upto 20MW in areas of 35kV, thus indicating that distributed projects are yet being favored. Such kind of local development plans must be produced to NEA by April for availing official approval. In this regard, once the projects received approval, a supervision scheme and monthly monitoring will come into implementation, assisting the central government in particular to reconsider the overall progress. Based on the definite growth, central government will subsequently determine which provinces will be awarded with an enhanced or get a potential reduction of their quota for the coming year.
The new target set also includes 1.5GW projects of poverty alleviation pilot spread across six provinces. Counties that are targeted for pilots are areas where a minimum of 200 households being eligible for 3kW solar system. The needed budget range for the hardware procurement will be offered by the central and provincial government. The inclusion of 1.5GW for poverty alleviation is to be looked in the regard of the efforts of central government to acquire a nationwide 100% electrification at the end of 2015.