China’s National Energy Administration (NEA) announced data related to total electricity consumption in China from January 2016 to June 2016. It was also the first time that NEA included photovoltaic (PV) power generation data. According to NEA’s statistics, in first half of 2016, PV power generation went up 28.1% from the same period last year, but it merely represented 0.6% of total electricity consumption.

Based on NEA’s published data on July 15, 2016, this June’s total electricity consumption was 492.5 billion kWh, up 2.6% year over year. During first half of 2016, total electricity consumption rose 2.7% year over year, and came to 2.7759 trillion kWh. After excluding February’s leap month factor, daily average electricity consumption increased 2.1% year over year. Meanwhile, average accumulated service hours of China’s power generated facilities went down 138 hours from first half of 2015, and came to 1,797 hours. Hydropower generation facilities’ service hours grew, but thermal power generation facilities’ service hours dropped.

Starting from this year, China included PV power generation into scope of NEA’s electricity statistics. According to NEA, June 2016’s wind power generation reached 17.3 billion kWh, solar PV power generation came to 3.3 billion kWh. For first half of 2016, wind generated electricity totaled 106.5 billion kWh, and PV power generation came to 17.5 billion kWh. Each of them showed an annual growth of 13.9% and 28.1%, respectively.

Proportion-wise, during first half of this year, PV power generation represented about 0.6% of China’s total electricity consumption, and wind generated electricity represented around 3.8% of it.

(Written by Rhea Tsao, Chief Editor of EnergyTrend. Translated by Janet Chen, Translator at TrendForce Corp.)