China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) has announced that the country has reached a cumulative installed solar capacity of around 186 GW. China added 11.4 GW on a year-over-year basis (YoY), which roughly translates to a 20% increase.

With the newly-added capacity, grid-connected solar photovoltaic (PV) projects now total 130.5 GW, with 6.82 GW added in the first half increase of 16%.

Distributed solar power generation projects have increased by 4.58 GW to reach an installed capacity of 55 GW, a 31% increase.

Of the newly installed solar capacity in the first half of 2019, North China accounted for 3.92 GW, making up 28.9% of the total. The new installed capacity in the northeast region was 260 MW, accounting for 2.3%, while East China accounted for 2.28 GW, which made up 20%. Central China’s newly installed solar energy capacity stood at 1.35 GW, accounting for 15.3% of the capacity while the Northwest region saw installations of 825 MW, making up 11.9%. The NEA data reveals that the newly installed capacity in Southern China was 768 MW, which is 6.7% of the total installations during this period.

Recently, Mercom reported on the news of the NEA approving 22.78 GW of Feed-in Tariff (FiT) based solar projects in China. These solar PV projects are expected to be grid-connected by December 2019. They have been approved under China’s first national unified bidding for solar projects seeking feed-in-tariffs. A total of 4,338 solar PV projects with a combined capacity of 24.55 GW were proposed to be developed, but only 3,921 projects totaling 22.78 GW had received the official approval. Apart from these, 417 proposed solar projects with a capacity of approximately 1.77 GW had not been approved.

In June 2019, China’s cumulative installed solar capacity stood at nearly 180 GW, the country added around 5.2 GW of new solar projects in the first quarter of 2019.

Image Credit: Suntech Power

Shaurya is a staff reporter at MercomIndia.com with experience working in the Indian solar energy industry for the past four years in various roles. Prior to joining Mercom, Shaurya worked with a renewable energy developer and a consulting company. Shaurya holds a Bachelors Degree in Business Management from Lancaster University in the United Kingdom.