What are the challenges faced by the pilot project for rural PV?

OFweek Solar Photovoltaic Network: Tens of thousands of impoverished villagers in Anhui will soon become the first batch of China's 30 billion yuan photovoltaic pilot project. However, this ambitious project still needs to solve a series of practical problems.

 

The government hopes to achieve poverty alleviation through photovoltaics and cope with the surplus of solar power generation capacity.

 

Anhui Yuexi County is located deep in the mountains of eastern China. When he heard that his county was included in the country's new photovoltaic poverty alleviation project, local residents must have felt very lucky.

 

Yuexi County is one of the poorest areas in China. There are 382,000 inhabitants living below the national poverty line with an annual income of 2,300 yuan (an average of 1 US dollar per day). This is also the county’s national “13th Five-Year Plan” poverty alleviation project. The main reason.

 

In 2015, Chinese President Xi Jinping announced that China will completely eradicate poverty by 2020 and help 70 million people living in poverty. In April 2015, the National Energy Administration of China issued a poverty alleviation plan and announced that it will promote the use of solar photovoltaics in 271 counties in 16 provinces across the country to increase the income of 200 million households in these areas.

 

The project is currently being piloted in Yuexi County, Anhui Province and will be promoted nationwide. The government will install 3-5 kilowatts of rooftop solar photovoltaic panels for households with annual income below the poverty line, and 60kW-100kW village collective distributed photovoltaic power stations in eligible poor villages. The project aims to use solar photovoltaic power generation to increase the income of each household by 3,000 yuan per year. Local villagers can also obtain additional income by renting non-ploughed land to the power station or maintaining the power station.

 

Up to now, Yuexi County has 182 villages (30,000 residents) who have obtained PV qualification for poverty alleviation, and the construction work has also started rapidly: 57 solar parks have been completed in 2015, and the remaining 125 will be completed in 2016.

 

Unlike many other developing countries in the world, about 99% of households in China have connected to the power grid.

 

Each household generates electricity for itself, which can not only reduce electricity bills but also sell surplus electricity to the grid. Of the profits of the village collective distributed photovoltaic power plants, 40% are divided equally by villagers, and the remaining 60% are used to pay for loans and park construction. This means that once the solar photovoltaic panels are installed, the participating households will soon see the benefits.

 

“The impact of the project has yet to be tested,” Kang Yixiong of China National Carbon Future Asset Management Co., which is responsible for the financial and technical supervision of the project, warned.

 

“This project may have a huge impact. The pilots are all the poorest households in China. There are basically no appliances at home (because they can't afford to pay for electricity at all).” The extra income that the project brings to them may change this. Situation. "We want to improve the living standards of these people. Sometimes it is not enough to supply electricity. In addition to energy supply, they need more help."

 

In addition to direct income, villagers may also receive subsidies from the country's solar power projects. Due to the excess capacity of solar power generation, the subsidy rate for 2017 will be reduced. However, as long as subsidies are available, the villagers’ income will increase. Village solar power stations will also become part of the carbon trading market that China is currently building. Village solar power plants with emission reduction certificates can use the carbon trading scheme to discount one ton of carbon dioxide emissions per 1,000 degrees of green electricity.

 

China's national carbon trading market will be officially launched in 2017. By then, China will have the world's largest carbon trading market, and the amount of transactions generated will be substantial. China has already launched pilot carbon trading markets in seven provinces and cities. Kang Yixiong said that the total amount of "quotas" for emissions in 2015 is equivalent to 1.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide, and the annual turnover is expected to reach 1.3 billion yuan.