China’s installed photovoltaic (PV) capacity more than doubled last year, turning the country into the world’s biggest producer of solar energy by capacity, the National Energy Administration (NEA) said on Saturday.
Installed PV capacity rose to 77.42 gigawatts at the end of 2016, with the addition of 34.54 gigawatts over the course of the year, data from the energy agency showed.
Shandong, Xinjiang, Henan were among the provinces that saw the most capacity increase, while Xinjiang, Gansu, Qinghai and Inner Mongolia had the greatest overall capacity at the end of last year, according to the data.
China will add more than 110 gigawatts of capacity in the 2016-2020 period, according to the NEA’s solar power development plan.
Solar plants generated 66.2 billion kilowatt-hours of power last year, accounting for 1 percent of China’s total power generation, the NEA said.
The country aims to boost the mix of non-fossil fuel generated power to 20 percent by 2030 from 11 percent today. Currently most of the non-fossil fuel power in China is from hydro power.
China ended 2015 with about 120 GW of wind power, 43 GW of solar, and 320 GW of hydro power.
China completed 8 nuclear reactors in 2015 and will be completing about 9 in 2016 (9.1 GW or about 70 TWh and another 7 in 2017 (7.6 GW or 50 to 55 TWh).
280 GW of hydro generated 1,064 TWh in 2014.
320 GW of hydro should generate about 1200 TWh.
In 2014, China’s wind power generation capacity reached 114.6 GW, and generated 153.4 TWh of electricity.
20 GW of wind would generate about 27 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity each year. 15 GW of solar would generate about 15 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity each year. As of October 2015, China plans to install 150-170 GW of solar power by 2020. China’s solar should generate 150-185 TWh in 2020.