In the last decade, the solar photovoltaic (PV) industry in China has developed rapidly, with the joint promotion of the market and policies. China’s PV modules’ production is ranked top in the world, making a significant impact on the world’s renewable energy development and solar PV industrial sector.
New and cumulative installed capacities of China's solar PV power from 2000 to 2017. In order to effectively coordinate the scale and speed of the solar PV installation with the economic development, China has occasionally set and adjusted the development targets for solar PV power.
China started generating solar photovoltaic (PV) power in the 1960s, and power generation is the dominant form of solar energy (Wang, 2010). After a long peroid of development, its solar PV industry has achieved unprecedented and dramatic progress in the past 10 years (Bing et al., 2017).
According to the national development strategy, China will develop solar photovoltaic power generation vigorously. Large-scale development of solar photovoltaic requires a lot of financial support, thus, how to achieve development goals with minimum cost is a meaningful study and can provide practical significance for policy studies.
Fig. 4 shows the optimal development path for China's solar PV power under the base case. The solar PV power development target for 2050 will be achieved in 2048, two years ahead of the schedule. The development trend will be maintained before 2040, but the a big vibration of the installed capacity appears after 2041.
The installed capacity of PV modules reached 19.6 MWp, which strongly promoted the development of China’s solar PV industry and stimulated market expansion. This is by far the largest construction project based on solar PV power generation in rural areas without a power supply that has been carried out to date.