China gears up for large solar plants, to tackle grid issues

Oct 14, 2014 - China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) issued on Monday guidelines to promote utility-scale solar arrays and improve planning so that it can ensure regular grid access and efficient management of the solar industry.

NEA said plant development in some areas is not adjusted to the existing grid capacity. Therefore, regional planning should match the project layout and scale with the electricity demand of the province and grid availability.

The construction of utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) plants, based on technological advances, will play a leading role in cost reduction. Selection will be based on economic and technological indicators and market conditions.

Grid compliance will be improved with intelligent systems to coordinate PV generation with thermal plants production and hydropower peaks.

NEA proposed PV installations to be integrated in various other industries, for example, in the construction of solar greenhouses. Moreover, the use of waste lands for facility siting should be encouraged to improve environmental management.

In addition, NEA is set to back the new plants financially by securing preferential loans by local financial institutions. It will also encourage the launch of PV investment funds and the development of other financing products.

Beijing established similar policies to spur the development of the emerging distributed solar industry in September. Earlier this year, NEA announced that the country aims to install 14 GW of PV capacity in 2014, including 8 GW of distributed generation (DG) systems and 6 GW of solar plants.

Looking ahead, China set even more ambitious targets for its 2016-2020 plan on energy, according to a report by China Daily from last week. The Asian country aims to increase its solar capacity five-fold to 100 GW by the end of the decade.

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