On the roof of a health center in Zhangqiu (Jinan), a district of about one million people in eastern China's Shandong province, are two rows of newly installed photovoltaic panels.
Soon, the plates will be connected to the network, thus completing the spark by which solar energy is converted into electricity for consumption.
There in front, on the roof of a public school, a group of workers can be seen working to assemble another installation, and there are two more roofs of the school already lined with panels.
Dong Yongshun, responsible for the project, is pointing out details here and there, indicating profit margins, powers and percentages.
Each of these facilities are not much, right.
The one from the school does not even cover the consumption of the center.
But it is a question of scale:
It is always worth descending from figures to the dust of the ground.
The sun glints this winter morning on the polysilicon cells of the plates while a haze of pollution hangs in the air and you can almost chew it.
Nothing too atypical in this region dedicated to heavy industry: pollution in the area exceeds tolerable thresholds for health this Sunday.
It is one of the problems that the country still drags from hyperdevelopment in the era of fossil fuels.
China, the world's largest emitter of CO₂ in absolute terms, has drawn up plans to reverse the trend.
It aims to reach peak emissions by 2030 and climate neutrality by 2060, and it wants solar power to be part of the answer.
In the last 15 years the country has become the great world empire of photovoltaics.
China's share in all phases of manufacturing solar panels—such as polysilicon, ingots, wafers, cells and modules—exceeds 80%, according to a 2022 report from the International Energy Agency (a geographic concentration that "creates challenges potentials", indicates the IEA; to which is added the concern of human rights groups about production in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, where there are suspicions that the Uyghur minority is subjected to forced labor, an accusation denied by Beijing).
The Asian giant is also the first exporter and the first consumer of panels.
In 2022, the country installed 87.4 gigawatts (GW) of new solar power, 59% more than in 2021. The figure is double the new capacity installed in 2022 in the European Union (in per capita terms the EU
would
be ahead) and represents around a third of what is installed worldwide.
About two-thirds of the new plates in China were placed on the roofs of all types of buildings, from factories to residences, according to industry estimates.
And a good fraction was similar to these small projects, such as the hospital and school in Zhangqiu, which are below 225 kilowatts (KW) of power and are part of a pilot project launched by the Government in 2021.
The scheme, dubbed something like the All-County Solar Rooftop Pilot Program, promotes the installation of silicon cells on rooftops in such administrative divisions.
Beijing is seeking solar power developers to ally with local authorities to transform square meters of useless roof tops into small solar farms.
The intention is to cover 50% of the space on the roofs of government buildings, 40% of schools and hospitals, 30% in industrial and commercial spaces and 20% in rural homes.
A group of workers works on a photovoltaic installation on the roof of a school in the Zhangqiu district, in Jinan.Guillermo Abril
A total of 676 counties from all over the country joined the pilot project in 2021, which will have to present results by the end of 2023. Zhangqiu is one of them.
"We've only just begun," jokes Zhou Cheng, CEO of State Cloud, the company coordinating the installation: looking at the map of the district hanging from his offices, located at the top of a skyscraper in the modern area of Jinan.
State Cloud is a Chinese public-private joint venture;
For this project, awarded through public bidding, it has capital from EnergyVision, a Belgian green investment company.
The Chinese company has identified some 90 schools and 30 hospitals in the district.
One of the many tasks for Dong, the project manager, is to go out there and talk to local authorities and homeowners to convince them that installing rooftop PV is a good idea.
They negotiate a rental price for the next 20 or 25 years, while the rate for the sale of electricity to the network is agreed upon by bidding with the district government.
Shandong is one of the provinces where the program has had the greatest push and perhaps the one that best summarizes the photovoltaic pull of the country.
As with almost everything in China, to understand its dimension you have to think on another scale.
The region has a population of about 100 million inhabitants and is one of the great centers of heavy industry in the People's Republic.
Its production capacity is immense.
It was the third province in the country in terms of GDP in 2022 —1.2 trillion euros, slightly below that of Spain.
But that also means that it is one of the countries with the highest energy consumption (the third, according to 2019 data) and the province that "has contributed the most to national CO₂ emissions during the last two decades", according to a recent study prepared by several Chinese academics.
Now,
David Fishman, a Chinese energy sector analyst at Shanghai-based consultancy Lantau Group, explains that the PV deployment model in China has a lot to do with space management.
Concentrated photovoltaic power plants can be installed in sparsely populated and even desert parts of the country with a large number of hours of sunshine, such as the Xinjiang Autonomous Region.
But these remote places are thousands of kilometers from energy consumption centers, such as Shandong, and this is not only due to industry: most of China's population lives in the East, where the land is generally more flat and fertile.
Shandong does not have as many hours of sunshine – around 1,250 per year – nor as much space to install panels.
But the proximity to the place where the energy is consumed reduces the costs and losses derived from transport, and makes the scheme more profitable.
“In this model of the roofs, everything is about space.
It is about finding space because there is no land left to build on”, adds the analyst.
“Instead, you have to negotiate with the person who owns the house and say, 'I'd like to use this roof and I'll pay you a fee in return, or I'll sell you the power at a discount off your current rate.'
Fishman, who is also visiting the State Cloud company project, calculates that an installation like this company's in the Zhangqiu public school can bring in gross annual income of about 133,000 yuan (about 18,226 euros) with a 6, 5% profit margin.
“Maybe not so much for one facility, but they have 90 schools in the district to develop,” he says.
He believes that 2023 will be an even better year in China than 2022 in terms of PV.
Partly because many of these program projects are often left to last: he expects installation to speed up as the year winds down.
“The decline of the traditional energy sector is predictable and obvious,” Zhou says, sitting at a long table in the office.
Zhou dresses like an executive, elegant with a modern edge.
Through the windows you can see the skyscrapers of the area.
He is 35 years old and has training and experience in the field of finance.
He believes that deep down this is not a field alien to photovoltaics, on the contrary: investments in this sector move with tiny margins, there are innumerable competitors, financing is a large part of the key.
He is not interested in investing abroad, he adds, but rather in attracting foreign capital.
And he foresees that in the medium term the company will reach "a greater dimension and quality" and manage to go public.
In China, he says, there is enough market and demand for the sector to continue growing.
You can follow CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENT on
and
, or sign up here to receive
our weekly newsletter
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Keep reading
I'm already a subscriber
