Successes and Failures of China's Golden-Sun Program

摘要

In 2009, the Chinese government released the policy about the Golden-Sun Program, deciding to provide investors with upfront subsidies prior to project construction with the special funds for renewable energy, with the aim to accelerate large-scale industrialization of PV power generation in China. This paper suggests four indicators used to assess the success and failure of the Golden-Sun Program: policy system design, effectiveness, administrative institution and time frame/development period. The results showed that: the success of the Golden-Sun Program is: fiscal subsidies play a notable role in promoting growth of China's PV market; it significantly improves the efficiency of constructing PV power generation facilities at home and provides clean energy to residents in rural areas without access to power; management and design of distributed PV power generation are improved significantly. The failure of the Golden-Sun Program is: lack of systematic design and effective coordination in policies; institutional deficiencies in policy design; obstacles to connecting user-side PV systems to the grid; lack of effective regulation leads to poor quality.