Villagers benefit from 'whole-county' pilot program's encouragement of distributed solar photovoltaic development. Hou Liqiang, Yuan Hui and Ma Jingna report.

Solar photovoltaic panels are placed on the rooftops of residences in Donglian village in Gansu province. (CHENG GANG / FOR CHINA DAILY)

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Viewed from a distance, Lianxing looks more like a solar energy farm than a rural village of 457 households. There are solar photovoltaic panels on almost all its rooftops and in every courtyard.

For generations, residents of the village in Wuyuan county, Inner Mongolia autonomous region, depended on straw, firewood and coal for cooking and heating.

But they have now abandoned those fuels, which often made their homes dirty, 40-year-old villager Shi Baohong said.

The new power generation facilities have also brought villagers a consistent stream of income with little effort. Shi earns almost 10,000 yuan ($1,400) a year from his solar PV panels and said there is still enough space between them to plant herbs and other cash crops in his courtyard of more than 300 square meters.

As China forges ahead with energy transition and rural vitalization, Lianxing and its almost 1,400 residents are a microcosm of the synergy that can be generated when the two campaigns are promoted simultaneously.

Different development modes have emerged, with rural residents being major beneficiaries.

The National Energy Administration said the installed capacity of household distributed solar PV power generation reached about 105 gigawatts by the end of September. That's over four times the capacity of the Three Gorges Dam project — the world's largest hydropower facility.

To date, more than 5 million rural households have been covered by the distributed power generation facilities — systems installed close to the place the electricity will be used. The rapid development has not only boosted energy transformation, but also driven the growth of farmers' incomes, the administration said in November.

It said roughly half the growth in the capacity of distributed solar PV in the first three quarters of last year — almost 33 GW — was contributed by household panels.

The administration also noted the huge potential for distributed solar PV power development in rural China, saying almost 27.3 billion square meters of rooftops belonging to more than 80 million rural households are suitable sites for panels.

It vowed to further promote its "whole-county" distributed solar PV development pilot program as part of efforts to drive even greater adoption.

Two workers install PV panels on the rooftop of a factory in Tangshan, Hebei province. (PHOTO / XINHUA)

Launched three years ago in 676 pilot county-level areas, the program aims to tap the potential of the rooftops of government and public buildings, industrial and commercial complexes and rural homes for distributed solar PV development.

Local authorities said the distributed solar PV system in Lianxing went into operation in 2017, three years after villagers moved into new homes fitted with solar panels. Households in the village now make an average of 8,000 yuan a year from selling solar energy to the grid.

Villagers did not have to pay for the new houses or power generation facilities thanks to a land-use rights transfer project. After their resettlement, the land previously covered by the villagers' old, dilapidated houses was turned into more than 130 hectares of farmland.

All the costs for the new houses and solar panels were covered by the company that invested in a large-scale agricultural development project.

"Villagers didn't pay even a single penny. It was a house-for-house deal, and that's not half bad," the village's Party chief, Li Chou, said.

He said people from nearby rural communities have been impressed by the progress made by Lianxing's residents after seeing the way the distributed solar PV program has resulted in a significant transformation of the village's living environment.

"The village is spotlessly clean. So is every household," Li said.

With vast stretches of desert and wasteland, Inner Mongolia is particularly suitable for large-scale, concentrated solar PV energy development, but the region has also made continued progress in household solar PV installation.

Inner Mongolia's distributed solar power generation capacity increased by 400 megawatts in the first three quarters of last year, the National Energy Administration said. That took the total in the region to over 1.6 GW, with more than a quarter contributed by household panels.

The neighboring province of Gansu has also seen remarkable progress in household solar PV adoption. While some rural residents paid for installation themselves, many others were offered another option — leasing their rooftops to solar energy development companies.

Liang Hongqi, from Dujiahe village in Hezheng county, Gansu, learned about distributed solar PV from the internet in 2017.

After the local grid company told him that preferential prices could lower the cost of installing a solar PV power generation system at his home, and that he could sell the surplus power it generated to the grid, the 59-year-old quickly decided to spend 34,000 yuan to put one on his rooftop.

His six-member family, which usually consumes 120 kilowatt-hours of electricity a month, now enjoys free power supply, Liang said, adding that he has also made 24,500 yuan from sales to the local grid.

The service life of a distributed solar power system is usually 20 to 25 years, and workers from the local grid company inspect his system regularly.

"What I need to do is to occasionally clean the PV panels to ensure that their power generation capability is not disrupted by sand and dust," he said.

Arrays of PV panels in the yards and on the rooftops of Lianxing village in Wuyuan, Inner Mongolia autonomous region, in June, 2023. (LI ZHIXUAN / FOR CHINA DAILY)

In Donglian village, in Gansu's Gaotai county, many families can earn 1,000 yuan a year without having to make any investment or do maintenance work. They lease their rooftops to a company for distributed solar PV development.

Hu Zongren, a village committee official, said that after seeing a news report about a nearby village installing distributed solar power systems, he called his counterpart there to learn more about it.

His decision to bring in the company to tap the solar energy potential of rooftops in the village and increase residents' incomes soon won support from 36 families.

"Villagers don't have to worry about how much power the facilities can generate. They only have to check whether the rental is paid in a timely manner every season," he said, adding the company pays villagers 50 yuan a year for every piece of panel installed on their rooftops.

Niu Jianping, the head of the new energy department at the Gansu Provincial Development and Reform Commission, said the development of distributed solar PV is of great significance for the country's climate targets and rural vitalization.

The province has seen roughly 910.4 MW of distributed solar PV put into operation, he said, with over 40 percent linked to rural vitalization efforts.

"By promoting demonstration projects with guiding roles, we aim to drive widespread adoption of experiences gained from these projects to promote the clean, low-carbon transition in the rural energy system and effectively boost the construction of necessary infrastructure," he said.

Juungar Banner in Inner Mongolia is one of the 676 pilot areas for whole-county distributed solar PV development. Under the pilot program, the banner government plans to install solar panels on more than 3.3 million square meters of rooftops, providing a total capacity of 243 MW.

After the pilot program is completed, the solar panels are expected to generate 360 million kWh of electricity a year. That would help eliminate the use of 113,000 metric tons of standard coal a year and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by over 300,000 tons, the banner government said.

It added, however, that it had encountered some challenges in promoting household solar PV development in rural areas.

The cost of a household solar PV system is relatively high for rural residents, with a long payback period, it said, adding that had made rural residents less willing to install panels.

Some old rural houses also had small rooftops, and some farmers were worried installation would damage their houses, it said.

To address the problem, it urged the central government to introduce more subsidies to encourage the development of distributed solar PV and also increase the price paid by grids for power generated by rooftop panels.

The banner government also stressed the need to upgrade rural grids to improve their ability to access distributed solar PV power.

In Lianxing, Shi is looking forward to seeing more rooftop solar PV panels.

"It makes our village clean," he said. "I hope more will be installed because, if that happens, more job opportunities will be created for those with economic difficulties. They can clean the panels to make a living."

There were still many spaces suitable for panel installation, he said, adding "It's really something good."

Contact the writers at houliqiang@chinadaily.com.cn