| With the current shortage of conventional energy sources and environmental degradation issues, it’s very urgent to develop and use of renewable energy. Solar energy, as the most promising renewable energy source, attracts global attention with its excellent resource properties. Exploiting and utilizing solar energy is considered to be an effective way to solve the global energy crisis and climate issues, the growing countries enhance the development and utilization of solar energy resources. So is China, facing the current energy structure dominated by fossil fuels, the state will promote the development and utilization of solar energy to the strategic position of Chinese energy and take it as the key and priority of development.China is very abundant in solar energy resources, which makes our country possess the prerequisite for the exploitation and utilization of solar energy. However, the development and use of solar energy not only need resources, but also be influenced by many other factors, such as land condition, economic level, etc. Taking this as an opportunity, this paper chooses solar as the research object and estimates resources reserves of solar energy and describes its spatial characteristics in China, based on the collection of large amounts of data and reference to the previous literatures. In addition to the conditions of the resource itself, it also analyzes other factors which affect the scale of the development and utilization of solar energy. Through the establishment of the index system for the first time, this paper comprehensively evaluates large-scale development and utilization of solar energy potential in various regions of the mainland China by using AHP decision analysis method, which also provides a guideline for judgment about the development and utilization of new energy potential in various regions in the future. This paper describes the current status of China’s solar energy industry and points out the problems and the opportunities in the process of development and utilization of solar energy. And according to those, it puts forward the corresponding policy recommendations.Through the analysis, the conclusions and judgments are as follows:(1) China is very rich in solar energy resources. In the mainland areas of China, the total annual radiation of the maximumvalue, minimumvalue and average value are respectively 8364MJ/m2,3324MJ/m2and5749MJ/m2. The total radiation of China’s solar energy resources is about5×1016MJ, which is equivalent to2.4trillion tce. In China’s energy structure, the proportion of renewable energy sources is constantly expanding, in the structure of renewable energy, the speed of development and utilization of solar energy is the fastest in recent years.(2) The annual solar radiation amount in the west of the southwest and northwest is the most abundant, while central China and the east of the southwest is the most poor. From the perspective of provincial average, the top three respectively include Tibet, qinghai, gansu province, then the last three provinces are successively hunan, guizhou,Chongqing. The maximum values of annual sunshine duration are distributed over the west of the southwest and northwest, while the east of the southwest and south China are minimal. Observing from the provincial average, qinghai, Tibet, gansu respectively ranks first to third,,while the last three provinces are hunan, guangxi, chongqing province. In northwest, north China, the effective sunshine days are the longest, the shortest of that refers to central China and south China. Viewing from the provincial average, Tibet, qinghai, Inner Mongolia are on the top of China, however, the last three provinces are fujian, guangxi, hubei province.(3) China’s mainland can be divided into six sections according to the solar energy resources potential:a. Extremely high-quality resource areas, mainly including western Tibet and western Qinghai;b. High quality areas, mainly including central and northern Tibet, northern Gansu, northern Qinghai, Ningxia most parts, eastern Xinjiang, midwestern Inner Mongolia; c. Good areas, mainly including western Xinjiang, eastern Inner Mongolia, western by northeastern provinces, northern Hebei, northern Ningxia, central Gansu, eastern and southern Qinghai, western Sichuan, most part of Shaanxi, northern Shanxi, a small part of the southeast Tibet; d. General areas, mainly including the north and east by Northeastern provinces, Beijing, Tianjin, northern Inner Mongolia, most parts of Yunnan, Hainan, northern Guangxi, northern Xinjiang; e. Relatively poor areas, mainly including southern Hebei, Shandong, a small part of southeast Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan, Anhui, a large part of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, Shanghai, Jiangxi, Fujian, most part of Hubei and Guangdong, and most parts of Guizhou; f. Poor areas, mainly distributed in Sichuan(except the western), southern Guizhou, Hunan, Guangxi, Chongqing.(4) The solar energy resources in western China is preceded these in eastern China according to feature of spatial distribution, as well as the northern(except Xinjiang, Tibet area) to the southern. The highest value appears in Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and the lowest value center is in Sichuan basin. The difference of solar energy resources among provinces is large and the gap within the same province is quite obvious. The whole shows the characteristics of asymmetry, unbalance and a very high concentrated degree. In last half century, the variation tendency of China’s solar, energy resource shows an obvious "dark first, then bright" phenomenon, but the overall tendency is decreasing. The reduction reasons of solar energy resources in western and eastern China are different, the environmental pollution is the mainly reason in eastern and humid climate leads to the reduction in western.(5) The solar energy potential of regional large-scale exploitation and utilization in China are ranked according to its weight coefficient. Namely, the northwest is ranked the first and its weight coefficient is0.28420;the southwest, north China, east China and central China regions are ranked from the second to sixth, and their weight coefficients are0.17755,0.15667,0.14423,0.08725, respectively;the comprehensive potential value of the south China is the weakest and its weight coefficient is0.07036.(6) The solar industry develops rapidly in China, and China has become the country of biggest production and use in the respect of solar heat utilization and biggest solar cell production. In solar heat utilization, the application fields extend to industry, agriculture and thermal generate electricity, etc. The market is advancing to rural areas and abroad, The number of enterprise has increased, but the industrial concentration is not high. In photovoltaic industry, polysilicon, solar cell production and photovoltaic power generation capacity have increased significantly, and the concentrated photovoltaic power generation cost has decreased obviously and in2013dropped to0.9yuan per kilowatt hour. The grid-connected generating capacity has a high concentration. At present, concentrated photovoltaic power generation is the main way while the proportion of distributed photovoltaic power generation will increase in the future. The government has published a lot of support policies of exploitation and utilization of solar energy, which promoted the solar industry development greatly. The international competitiveness of solar industry in our country has obvious advantage, but the technical level needs to be improved.(7) At present, in the respect of spatial distribution of the solar industry, heat utilization industry gathers in eastern China, but it is a trend for transference to central and western China. Some upstream industry of photovoltaic industry mainly gathers in Sichuan, Beijing, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, etc. Photovoltaic system power station mainly distributes in Qinghai, Gansu, etc.(8) The utilization of China’solar energy is facing with the coexist of problems and opportunities. It should be attached importance to law and policy, technology and talents, market and enterprise, international cooperation and competition in order to promote the development and utilization of solar energy and strengthen energy strategic reserve, and to ensure energy security. |
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