China’s new PV power capacity is expected to hit 10 GW by the end of Q4, which will boost the entire year’s figure to around 26 GW, according to the China Electricity Council (CEC).
According to its recent report, the new power generation capacity in the country will top 100 GW this year, including 60 GW from non-fossil fuel power. This will boost the entire country’s accumulated power capacity by 5.3% to 2,000 GW at the end of the year, of which 200 GW will be from PV power.
In the first three quarters of 2019, China’s new power capacity reached a total of 64.55 GW, which is down by 16.59 GW from a year earlier; of these, approximately 37.88 GW are from non-fossil fuel power (58.7% share), 20.1 GW are from coal-fired power, and 5.44 GW are from co-generation capacity.
China’s total non-fossil fuel power capacity had reached a total of 810 GW as of the end of September, which is up by 1.2 percentage points from the same period in 2018, for a total share of 41.4%. The capacity of the grid-connected PV power in the country is around 190 GW during the same period, representing an increase of around 16.6% year-on-year.
In the first nine months of 2019, the overall grid-connected output of PV power in China totaled 170.7 billion kWh, which is an increase of around 29.0% year-on-year. During the same period, the average utilization time of power generation facilities amounted to 2,857 hours. This is around 48 hours less than a year earlier; for the grid-connected PV power facilities, the average utilization time has been increased by approximately 60 hours to 1,010 hours.
In the recent months, the problems of idled capacities for PV power and wind power in China have both been improved, with the new energy capacity utilization rates of State Grid Corp. of China and China Southern Power Grid Company both exceeding 96%.