China Is On an Epic Solar Power Binge (technologyreview.com)

An anonymous reader links to an article on MIT Technology Review: It's worth taking a minute to appreciate the sheer scale of what China is doing in solar right now. In 2015, the country added more than 15 gigawatts of new solar capacity, surpassing Germany as the world's largest solar power market. China now has 43.2 gigawatts of solar capacity, compared with38.4 gigawatts in Germany and 27.8 in the United States. According to new projections, it seems that trend is going to continue. Under its 13th Five Year Plan, China will nearly triple solar capacity by 2020, adding 15 to 20 gigawatts of solar capacity each year for the next five years, according to Nur Bekri, director of the National Energy Administration. That will bring the country's installed solar power to more than 140 gigawatts. To put that in context, world solar capacity topped 200 gigawatts last year and is expected to reach 321 gigawatts by the end of 2016.

Comments

Re:How do I read this?

[Rei]

It's peak power rating, as most plants are rated for. To get the average power generation rate you have to multiply by the capacity factor. For fixed tilt, industrial solar in a good location you may get upwards of 25% capacity, but don't expect better than that. Heliostats improve that figure. Random rooftop installations or solar in less than optimal regions yield significantly reduced capacity factors.

I assume this is mostly industrial scale fixed-tilt in as good of locations as China has (China is pretty bright, but not as bright as the US desert southwest). I'd wager they get about 20% capacity factor.

Re:That's nice

[Anonymous Coward]

One reference claims China consumed 5130 billion kilowatt hours in 2014. Which is a really stupid way of saying terawatt hours. Divided by time, that is roughly 585 gigawatts continuous energy drain in 2014.

So, 20/585 (assuming no increase in demand, ever) comes out to slightly over 3%.

Re:How do I read this?

[Penguinisto]

Panels are usually rated in Wp (peak wattage), which is an instantaneous reading taken under optimal conditions (of both light and temperature).

Typical top-end panels pump out about 240-260 Wp - call it 250Wp. This means you'd need four top-end monocrystal solar panels to get 1 kWp, 4,000 of them to get 1 MWp, etc.

Mind the "peak" portion though - typical daylight production is averaged to something like 50-60% of peak (to account for stuff like clouds, the sun not being perfectly perpendicular to the usually-fixed panel, high temperature degradations, etc.) This means that you usually have to overbuild by at least 40-50%...

TL;DR - that's a real big frigload of panels that they're looking to build and install.