The role of PV in China's energy policy through 2015

At the 2009 Copenhagen Conference, China promised to reduce its carbon emissions per unit of GDP by 40-50% by 2020. In order to achieve this goal, the authorities in China announced that the proportion of non-fossil fuel energy sources in China's primary energy supply will rise to 15%.

To realize the proportion of non-fossil energy target, the initial planning in the 12th Five Year Plan is to invest in CNY4 trillion to develop seven strategic new industries. The renewable energy source industry is one of the seven. According to China's renewable energy industry development planning, the target installation of windpower is 90GWp, hydroelectric is 280GWp, solar is 10GWp, and biomass is 1.3MWp by 2015.

During the 12th Five Year Plan period, solar PV will be the fastest growing renewable energy. At the end of 2010, solar PV system installations were only 822MWp in China, however, as the price of solar products has been decreasing rapidly in recent years, installations in China in the next five years will grow by tenfold to reach the target of 10GWp.

The 12th Five Year Plan also set up plans to regulate the environment of the solar PV industry. The plan sets to control the volume of crystalline silicon PV industries. The government will allocate resources to the main solar firms with targets such as having 1-2 firms with polysilicon production capacity of 50,000 tons and 2-4 firms with 10,000 tons of capacity. The government also hopes to have 1-2 firms with solar cell production capacity reaching 5GW and 8-10 firms reaching 1GW. Lastly, China hopes to have 3-4 solar equipment firms with annual revenues exceeding CNY1 billion.