An analysis of the factors driving utility-scale solar PV investments in China: How effective was the feed-in tariff policy?

Alex Hongliang Zhang, Selahattin Şi̇ri̇n, Conglai Fan and Maoliang Bu

Energy Policy, 2022, vol. 167, issue C

Abstract: China has become a global manufacturing hub for many industries; recently, thanks to various renewable energy support schemes, we also see the country's growing share in renewable energy investments. However, significant renewable energy investment is still required to achieve China's ambitious carbon targets: achieving carbon peak by 2030, and carbon neutrality by 2060. Based on province-level data covering the whole period of feed-in tariff (FIT) support mechanism, this paper explores the effect of renewable energy subsidies, costs and other economic factors on the installed capacity of utility-scale solar PV (UPV) in China. Our findings indicate that the FIT mechanism in tandem with a significant reduction in renewable energy investment costs have been the major drivers of China's dramatic increase in UPV investments. However, subsidies to distributed solar PV investments also have a crowding-out effect on UPV investments, which result in a statistically significant co-opetition relationship between UPV and Distributed PV. Furthermore, heterogeneity in provincial power consumption and energy supply also affect these investment dynamics.

Keywords: China; Feed-in tariff; Solar PV; Panel model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421522002695
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:enepol:v:167:y:2022:i:c:s0301421522002695

DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2022.113044

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Policy is currently edited by N. France

More articles in Energy Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().