China’s solar developers installed a record 12GW of photovoltaic
projects in 2013, and a booming market at the very end of the year may
even have pushed installations up to 14GW. No country has ever added
more than 8GW of solar power in a single year prior to 2013, and China’s
record outstripped even the most optimistic forecasts of 12 months ago.
A CNY 1 (16 US cents) per kWh feed-in tariff for large PV projects
connecting to the transmission grid ended on 1 January, creating the
year-end rush. China’s National Energy Administration announced earlier
this month that there were 12GW of 2013 installations, but this
preliminary estimate may be exceeded. The Bloomberg New Energy Finance Industry Intelligence database,
which tracks projects individually, identifying developer, owner,
location and often equipment supplier or financer, already records 9.5GW
of projects built in China in 2013. Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s
research team continues to add projects, and will have nearly complete
data by March.
China’s solar projects are heavily concentrated in its sunny and
empty western provinces of Gansu (with 24% of all installations last
year), Xinjiang (18%) and Qinghai (17%). Thanks to this activity in
2013, China’s state-owned power generators China Power Investment
Corporation, China Three Gorges and China Huadian Corporation have
become the world’s largest owners of solar assets. The Chinese government is targeting 14GW of additional PV capacity in
2014. Transmission grid-connected projects were the vast majority of
China’s solar market last year, but the government is aiming for at
least 60% of this year’s installations to be rooftop capacity, which is
connected to the distribution grid rather than the transmission grid. A
shift to rooftops rather than remote deserts will bring additional
legal and financial complications for developers and so Bloomberg New
Energy Finance expects the target to be slightly undershot in 2014 – but
with higher growth in 2015.
“The 2013 figures show the astonishing scale of the Chinese market,
now the sleeping dragon has awoken” said Jenny Chase, head of solar
analysis at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “PV is becoming ever cheaper
and simpler to install, and China’s government has been as surprised as
European governments by how quickly it can be deployed in response to
incentives.”
Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates the global PV market in 2013
to have been 39GW, up 28% from 2012, and expects a further 20% global
volume growth in 2014. This year, the world will install as much PV in
12 months as the cumulative total installed solar from the invention of
the photovoltaic module until 2010.
The world’s three largest markets for PV in terms of new GW capacity
in 2013 were China, Japan and the US, with Germany – for many years the
heaviest investor in solar –a distant fourth.
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