Much Ado About Solar II
…and we’re back! Apologies of the prolonged dormancy, but yours truly has been busy lately transitioning to his new day job. But no time to waste! Let’s pick things up really quickly with some solar updates.
First, my solar policy paper, Getting out of the Shade: Solar Energy as National Security Energy, which we summarized before in a previous post, has now been published in three parts on China Dialogue. While the content remains the same, what’s new is that an Chinese version is now available.
中国太阳能产业转向国内市场 (1)
中国太阳能产业转向国内市场 (2): 重新定义国家安全
中国太阳能产业转向国内市场 (3):发现太阳能发电的瓶颈所在
There is an extra bit of text that is new in this edition that is worth noting:
[相当振奋人心的是，自从这篇文章发表之后，中国开始将太阳能产业转向国内市场。经济部与住房和城乡建设部开始发展太阳能屋顶计划以每瓦二十人民币的方式补助优质的太阳能光伏面板系统。然而在某些省份，尤其考虑在江苏提供可观的财政鼓励以增加当地太阳能光伏面板的制造与发展。]
[Encouragingly, since the first publication of this article, China has begun its journey out of the shade: China's Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development has launched a solar roofs programme to subsidise qualifying PV systems at 20 yuan (US$3) per watt, while some provinces, particularly Jiangsu, are poised to offer significant financial incentives to increase local capacity in PV manufacturing and deployment.]
And what a surge in domestic solar projects there has been in response! Many of the new projects were tracked on a previous post Much Ado About Solar, and so we have a continuation of more solar activity announced since that post:
- More than 200 MW of PV projects from Jiangsu province alone may apply for the recently announced solar offs program subsidies. To put that number in context, China is targeting 300 MW of installed solar (including non-PV solar applications such as concentrating solar power) by 2010 in all of China. Among Jiangsu’s proposed projects includes Suntech’s massive 1.5 MW rooftop poject covering 19,000 square meters.
- China SDIC Huajing will build a whopping 200 MW solar power station in Qinghai province at the price tage of 2 billion yuan.
- Renesolar will build a 5 MW roof top project in Zhejiang province and will take advantage of subsidies from the solar roof program.
- Solar panel solutions provider Best Solar and Nanjing-based environmental chemical and new energy company GCL Engineering plan to build nine PV rooftop-based projects in Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi province.
- Qinghai has approved a 2009-2015 solar development plan which will throw in big bucks into at least 13 various solar manufacturing and installation projects, hoping to create a RMB 86 billion (revenues per year) industry. Not to be outdone, Jiangsu, the California of China’s new energy industry, has grand plans to derive RMB 350 billion per year from solar by 2011.
- Meanwhile, we are seeing lots of new factories for module manufacturing, particularly for thin film, being set up, including a thin-film plant by Lvzhou New Energy with an annual capacity of 200 MW per year in Zhenjiang, Jiangsu province. To put that number in context, China produced 2,540 MW of PV in all of last year.
In the mean time, we can hardly wait for the impending announcements of new incentives for renewable energy, which according to Zhou Xi’an, an official of the National Bureau of Energy under the National Development and Reform Commission, should be coming “very soon.”
October 5th, 2009 at 1:32 am
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