China’s rooftops hold key to propelling solar power into the mass market
Third-party funding and lower costs give boost to renewable energy as mainland set to overtake Germany as nation with world’s highest installed solar capacity
China may be on the verge of finally cracking the crucial urban and suburban solar market thanks to a new funding model that allows buyers to have panels installed for free.
The world's largest producer of photovoltaic panels has built massive solar farms in the country's deserts, but a disappointing take-up of solar power in cities and industrial hubs has meant the country has fallen well short of official targets.
The time is right now for solar power on rooftops in China because the cost of putting a system on the roof is becoming much more attractive
Even as China is set to overtake Germany as the country with the world's highest installed solar capacity, growth in small-scale solar such as rooftop panels has been so weak that planners did not even bother setting new targets this year for installations under 20 megawatts (MW) in size.
However, the arrival of third-party financing models, already popular in the United States, could help China unlock the potential of solar like Germany and Japan, where rooftop panels helped to boost capacity and bring record levels of renewable energy into the power mix.
“The options today in China are a lot better than they were 12 months ago,” said Ross Allan, director of business administration at Dulwich College, Suzhou, an international school that is considering installing panels.
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China wants to boost solar capacity from 28 gigawatts (GW) in 2014 - roughly 2 per cent of the country's total power capacity - to 100 GW by 2020.