“Solar PV+”, or solar PV integrated with agriculture, solar PV fisheries and solar PV livestock operations show the potential ahead. Despite the remarkable success of China’s solar policies, recent updates have brought huge uncertainty about whether distributed solar PV projects will continue to boom.
China’s electricity rates for industry and commerce are much higher than those for households. Thus, if businesses install distributed solar PV to generate power for themselves, they can achieve considerable savings. Other diversified applications are emerging, too.
Distributed solar PV has been installed mainly in east and south China, where the country’s economy is most prosperous and demand for power is greatest. About 52 percent of capacity is in four provinces: Zhejiang, Shandong, Jiangsu and Anhui. There are four main reasons that distributed solar PV is growing faster than ever: 1. National Targets
Limitations of the construction of power grid As shown in Section 2, one of the characteristic of the China's solar energy distribution is its concentration in remote areas such as northwest China and Inner Mongolia. As far away from load demand center, the power grid construction is relatively weak in those areas.
Distributed solar PV generated 13.7 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2017, enough to power all the households in Beijing for 7.5 months. The accumulated installed capacity of distributed solar PV now accounts for 27.1 percent of China’s total solar PV installation.
China has a strong share of distributed solar PV, with close to 225 GW out of 536 GW, reflecting a diverse and robust deployment and bringing affordable clean electricity alongside greater energy independence.