Photovoltaic development must rely on wind power

According to the forthcoming “12th Five-Year Plan for Renewable Energy Development”, by 2015, the installed target for solar power generation is 15 million kilowatts (including 1 million kilowatts of thermal power generation), and the target for generating electricity is 19.5 billion kilowatt-hours. Based on this calculation, the total amount of solar energy generating capacity (4.1 billion tons of standard coal) at the time of solar power generation is 1.92%, which is nearly 2 percentage points higher than the proportion of 0.05% as of 2011, and the task is arduous.

In 2011, the domestic installed capacity of solar power generation reached 3 million kilowatts, which was more than three times more than the 900,000 kilowatts in 2010. Despite the obvious increase, its overall size is still small compared with other renewable energy forms up to tens of millions of kilowatts. According to relevant experts, it is the size of solar power that is currently relatively small, and the potential hidden troubles in its industrial development are far less important than wind power. However, from the development of wind power in the past few years, the phenomena such as the repeated construction of projects and the bottleneck in the grid connection are worthy of reference to the “late-comers” of solar energy.

It is understood that the National Energy Administration will start the development plan for the first batch of 3 million kilowatts of solar power projects in the "Twelfth Five-Year Plan" this year. This shows that the policy has begun to consider the experience of drawing on the unified planning of wind power project development, and also controls the total amount of solar energy project development. The trend of this policy is clearly to try to avoid a "great leap forward" in the solar energy industry.

The bottleneck of the grid connection has gradually revealed the constraints on the profitability of solar photovoltaic power plants that have already been built. According to industry experts, the impact of solar power on the safe and stable operation of the power grid is even worse than that of wind power, which also indicates that the problem of solar power grid connection will be more prominent. At the same time, due to the fact that most of the photovoltaic power stations built in China are built in remote areas, the power grids are not covered in place, and the emitted power cannot be transported outside. This is a major challenge.

Large-scale wind power generation by wind farms has created a phenomenon of “discarding the wind”. If the above issues are not solved expeditiously, the phenomenon of “discarding light” may also become a pain in solar energy in the near future. This point has been constantly mentioned by many people of insight.

Therefore, it is necessary to start planning the layout of solar energy grids earlier in the policy and accelerate the development of solar energy grid connection and the construction of power transmission channels. More voices indicated that, unlike wind power, the “large base” development route is different, solar energy can be used to promote decentralized development, and to encourage self-use of electricity.

Wang Jun, director of the New Energy and Renewable Energy Division of the National Energy Administration, wrote that the “self-use” model is the basic existing method and development trend of new energy generation and distributed generation. If the distributed power station projects such as photovoltaic building integration are promoted nationwide, the power generation of large-scale power plants can be eliminated.