China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) officially released the full articles of the 13th Five-Year Plan, regulating the energy development roadmap and action plan from 2016 to 2020. For solar PV, the basic grid-connected target is more than 105GW, including the distributed generation (DG) installation of more than 60GW. NDRC will be committed to regional balance and light abandoned improvement during the period. Also, they will try to have grid parity come online by 2020.   Increasing the use of clean, low-carbon energy is an important goal for the energy transformation during the 13th Five-Year Plan.

The National Energy Administration is expected to invest RMB 2.5 trillion in increasing the proportion of non-fossil energy consumption to over 15% and more than 10% for natural gas.

The proportion of coal consumption will have to be reduced to less than 58%.   PV goal: DG systems and high-efficiency technology   The 2020 solar target is “more than 110GW”, including 5GW of solar thermal, 45GW of ground-mounted installation, and 60GW of DG installation. Up until the end of 2016, the amount of DG systems has not yet reached 20GW in China, showing that there’s great room for development in the next few years.   The National Energy Administration announced the innovation plan for energy technology on January 13th, proposing the plan to increase silicon solar cell efficiency to more than 23% before 2020 and promote next-generation technology localization. The technologies that will be put into research include: production scale and technology of thin-film solar, III-V compound cells, perovskite cells, dye-sensitized cells, and quantum dot cells.   Meanwhile, the National Energy Administration will launch Research & development on commercialization of high-efficiency and low-cost silicon cells, including the localization of heterojunction (HJT) and IBC technologies to boost cell efficiency to more than 23%. They will also build 25MW demonstration production lines for HJT and IBC cells.   Other solar development goals include: technology improvement, cost reduction, market expansion, system optimization, development deployment optimization, DG development prioritization, "PV +" diverse application promotion, large-scale development, regional PV power plant construction promotion, and the establishment of light abandoned warning mechanism. Last but not least, the final goal is to reach grid parity by 2020.