Full Text: China's Energy Policy 2012

-- Effectively developing wind power. As a non-water renewable energy, wind power is currently the most appropriate energy source for large-scale development and market-driven utilization. China's wind power industry is the fastest-growing in the world. During the 12th Five-Year Plan period, China will stress both intensive and distributed exploitation, and optimize the development layout of wind power. It will push forward wind power construction in an orderly way in the northwestern, northern and northeastern regions, which boast abundant wind energy, and speed up the development and utilization of distributed resources. It will steadily develop offshore wind farms, and improve the standards for wind-power equipment and the supervision system of this industry. China will encourage wind-power equipment manufacturers to expedite R&D of key technologies, so as to accelerate the technological upgrading of this industry. By means of speeding up grid construction, increasing the grid's dispatch level, improving the performance of wind-power equipment, and strengthening wind-power prediction and forecast, China aims to improve its power grids' wind-power integration ability. The installed generating capacity of wind power is expected to reach 100 million kw by the end of 2015, with 500 kw of generating capacity coming from offshore wind farms.

-- Actively making use of solar energy. China is rich in solar energy, which boasts immense room for development and has a promising future. During the 12th Five-Year Plan period, China will promote diverse patterns of solar-power development by integrating intensive exploitation with distributed utilization. It will construct large on-grid photovoltaic power stations and solar power generation projects in Qinghai and Gansu provinces, and the Xinjiang Uygur and Inner Mongolia autonomous regions, which boast abundant solar energy and scattered plots of unutilized land, for the purpose of increasing local supplies of electricity. It will encourage the central and eastern regions to construct distributed photovoltaic power generation systems linked to local buildings. Intensified efforts will be made to popularize solar water heaters, and promote the development of solar central hot-water supply, solar heating and cooling, and medium- and high-temperature industrial applications of solar energy. It will spread solar water heaters, solar cookers and solar houses in the countryside, border areas, and small cities and towns. China's installed generating capacity of solar energy is expected to exceed 21 million kw by 2015, with a total solar heat collection area of 400 million sq m.

-- Developing and utilizing biomass energy and other types of renewable energy. China will develop biomass energy and other renewable energy resources under the principle of "orderly development based on local conditions and comprehensive utilization with all factors taken into consideration." It will promote power generation using crop stalks, grain-processing residues and bagasse as fuels in major producing areas of grain and cotton; and carefully develop woody biomass power generation in forest-covered areas. Attention will be given to the promotion of electricity generation by means of waste incineration and landfill gas in urban areas. The country will also speed up the construction of biomass gas, including methane, supply systems in eligible regions, and build production bases of biomass molding fuel in accordance with local conditions. Efforts will also be made to develop biodiesel and industrial cellulosic ethanol. China will spread the technology of efficiently using geothermal energy on the condition that underground water is protected. It will reinforce the tracking and R&D of electricity generation technologies by using tidal energy, wave energy and hot dry rocks.

-- Promoting distributed utilization of clean energy. China will energetically develop distributed energy resources on the principle of "giving priority to local supply, feeding the surplus into the grid, development based on local conditions, and advancing in an orderly way." It will accelerate the construction of distributed energy systems (DES) for natural gas at energy load centers. It will energetically spread the technology of distributed renewable energy, especially in high energy-consumption centers, including cities and industrial parks. It will carry out distributed renewable energy construction in rural areas, forest regions and islands in accordance with local conditions. Efforts will be made to set standards for distributed energy, and improve the formation mechanism and polices for on-grid price. Hard work will be done to realize direct supply, and non-discriminatory and barrier-free connection to the grid of power generated in the distributed manner. During the 12th Five-Year Plan period, China will construct about 1,000 projects of natural gas DES, and ten distributed energy demonstration areas with various typical characteristics.