China nears 35.8 GW of installed PV with over 7.7 GW of H1 additions

Solar power system. Author: Mountain/ \Ash. License: Creative Commons, Attribution 2.0 Generic.

China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) said Tuesday that the county’s installed photovoltaic (PV) capacity has reached 35.78 GW at the end of June 2015, after it switched on some 7.73 GW in the first half alone.

In terms of large solar power plants, China has switched on a total of 6.69 GW in January-June. This brought the nominal capacity of such facilities across the country to 30.07 GW, NEA calculates.

In the meantime, the combined capacity of the distributed generation (DG) solar arrays in the Asian country grew by 1.04 GW to 5.71 GW.

All in all, China has produced 19 TWh of solar power in the first six months of 2015, roughly 1.8 TWh of which were not transmitted by the grid. Solar curtailment rates were highest in Gansu and Xinjiang, where they stood at 28% and 19%, accordingly.

A total of eight Chinese regions currently operate over 1 GW of solar capacity as of the end of June. Details are available in the table below:

Location	Installed PV capacity
Gansu province	5.78 GW
Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region	5.7 GW
Qinghai province	4.7 GW
Inner Mongolia autonomous region	4.03 GW
Jiangsu province	3.02 GW
Ningxia Hui autonomous region	2.39 GW
Hebei province	1.6 GW
Zhejiang province	1.43 GW

As for the full 2015, NEA has set an official PV capacity additions target of 17.8 GW. The world’s leader in installed PV is set on reaching 100 GW by the end of the decade.

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