Text | Xiao Tian
As an important component of clean new energy, photovoltaics will arouse market attention every change in the industry.
On November 24, affected by the news that rooftop photovoltaic power generation projects were suspended in many places, A-share photovoltaic concept stocks continued to decline, including many oriental Risen Energy, JA Technology (002459. SZ), SZ (603098. SH) and many other PV concept star stocks.
The negative news comes from a news two days ago: as a pilot city promoted by distributed photovoltaic counties, many places in Henan have successively suspended the filing of photovoltaic power plants, including at least 10 pilot areas such as Zhenping County, Xiuwu County, Ye County, Puyang County, and Dengzhou City.
According to media reports: "The filing documents related to rural household photovoltaic power generation submitted by several agents are piled up in the office of the county power supply bureau." They did not get noticed as quickly as usual. Including the application form for farmers to install photovoltaic power generation themselves, they also lie in the office and have not received a reply. ”
From the perspective of the whole country, the whole city of Changde, Hunan has also suspended the filing of new photovoltaic power generation projects. Further back, in July this year, Shaoguan City, Guangdong Province, also suspended the filing of some rooftop photovoltaic projects.
At a time when the construction of rooftop photovoltaic power generation projects is in full swing, why do many places want to do the opposite? Is the bubble of the trillion-level photovoltaic track about to burst?
China's photovoltaic industry originated at the end of the last century. At that time, both technology, products and markets were seriously lagging behind foreign countries, and development has been stumbling. Until joining the WTO in 2001, China's photovoltaic industry ran wild. Especially after 2005, the state began to provide policy support for the photovoltaic industry. After experiencing the highlight moment, it has also fallen to the bottom of the valley, and between the ups and downs, today's Chinese photovoltaic industry has firmly occupied the top spot in the world photovoltaic industry.
China's distributed PV market originated in 2009. At the same time that the high initial installation subsidy of the "Golden Sun Project" of that year drove the centralized power station, it briefly drove the growth of distributed photovoltaics.
In 2013, China officially implemented the benchmark feed-in tariff policy for photovoltaic power plant sub-regions, and determined that distributed photovoltaics should be subsidized by 0.42 yuan per kWh including tax, and the era of photovoltaic subsidies began.
Three years later, due to the abandonment of light in the "Three North Regions" and restrictions on the construction of centralized power stations, distributed photovoltaics were able to usher in a three-year period of explosive growth: from 2016 to 2020, China's new installed distributed photovoltaics were 4 GW, 19 GW, 21 GW, 12 GW, 16 GW, accounting for 12%, 36%, 48%, 40%, and 32% of the total new installed capacity that year.
In 2021, China's photovoltaics have entered the era of parity internet access. In the same year, "carbon peaking" and "carbon neutrality" were written into the government work report for the first time, and "carbon dioxide emissions strive to peak by 2030 and strive to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060" is China's target commitment. To achieve the double-carbon target, the central task is to replace the current fossil-based carbon-based energy with zero-carbon energy based on renewable electricity. In the field of photovoltaics, distributed projects have been highly anticipated as a model that has been discussed and tried in the industry for many years. The "rooftop photovoltaic" that is closely integrated with the building has also become a hot spot in the industry.
According to the joint survey and calculation between Tsinghua University and the Satellite Information Research Institute of the former Ministry of Land and Resources, about 2 billion kilowatts of photovoltaic power generation devices can be installed on various roofs in Rural China, and the annual power generation capacity is close to 3 trillion kWh, accounting for 40% of China's total electricity consumption in 2019, and will reach 60% of the total photovoltaic power generation in China's zero-carbon power system planned. The importance is obvious.
Soon, the policy level gave a clear route, directly igniting the rooftop distributed photovoltaic industry.
On June 23, the National Energy Administration issued the "Notice on Submitting the Pilot Program for the Development of Distributed Photovoltaics on rooftops in whole counties (cities and districts") (hereinafter referred to as the "Notice"), pointing out that the pilot work of distributed photovoltaic development on rooftops in whole counties (cities, districts) will be organized nationwide.
Securities companies have expressed optimism about the prospects of the distributed photovoltaic industry. According to the report of Soochow Securities, assuming that the whole country is a pilot, according to the pilot requirements, the total total space of distributed photovoltaics on rooftops in the country exceeds 600 GW; Changjiang Securities calculates the total power generation power of 710 million KW according to the 15% market penetration rate, corresponding to a market size of 3.9 trillion yuan.
No matter which calculation method is followed, distributed rooftop photovoltaics will usher in a huge growth space with the help of policy dividends, and this good news has also been passed on to the capital market.
In the secondary market, the photovoltaic distributed sector that has been dormant for many months has rebounded. On the first trading day after the promulgation of the policy, Jiayu Shares, Guangtian Group, Qingyuan Shares, etc. directly rose and stopped and continued to benefit. Taking Trina Solar as an example, its company's stock price has risen all the way from June, from the lowest point of 15.56 yuan / share to 85 yuan / share, which has doubled 5 times in just a few months, and the market value has exceeded 140 billion.
It is worth mentioning that before the county-wide promotion model was proposed, private enterprises have been the main force in distributed photovoltaic investment, design, construction, operation and other aspects. With the introduction of the whole county promotion model, central enterprises and state-owned enterprises have also begun to enter the bureau on a large scale. They continue to push the construction of rooftop photovoltaics to one climax after another.
China's rooftops may be covered with glass or photovoltaic membranes of various photovoltaics in the next three to five years. Liu Yuhui, chief economist of Tianfeng Securities, made a very vivid analogy, "Not to let any piece of China's roof be exposed to the sun."
Photovoltaic rooftop projects can be expected in the future, but through policy-driven pushes rather than market spontaneous drive, it is often a harm to the industry. More typical is China's new energy automobile industry, from the results, China has become the world's new energy vehicle power, but has also paid a price, such as infrastructure can not keep up, overcapacity, enterprise fraud and so on.
Today, with the introduction of the "whole county promotion" policy, and clearly set a 30% mission target. Rooftop photovoltaic projects have also encountered the problem of "anxious to eat hot tofu" and "hot mouth".
On November 22, the Henan Provincial Development and Reform Commission issued a notice requiring the smooth and orderly promotion of rooftop photovoltaic power generation construction. In the circular, an important point was mentioned - "it is necessary to guide the leading enterprises and upstream and downstream enterprises in the industrial chain to strengthen cooperation in accordance with the principle of marketization".
In the eyes of industry insiders, behind this notice refers directly to the photovoltaic monopoly business in many places in Henan - violating the "five major working principles" of the county-wide promotion policy formulated by the state: voluntary non-compulsion, pilot non-approval, non-overstepping in place, non-monopoly competition, and no suspension of work.
Taking Xiangcheng County, Henan Province, as an example, as one of the 676 pilot cities for the promotion of the whole county in the country, a number of manufacturers have poured into this unobtrusive small city, ready to do a big job. However, a "ban" has blocked many of the needs for the installation of power plants from the filing. The reason for the suspension was that the Xiangcheng County Government signed a cooperation framework agreement with the state-owned enterprise Yuneng Holdings, clarifying that Xiangcheng County would promote the transfer of rooftop photovoltaic resources to Yuneng Neng, a subsidiary of Yuneng Holdings.
According to the phoenix network "Eye of the Storm" reported, after the promotion of the whole county, the "one enterprise package one county" exploration model prevailed. The protagonists of this wave of "one enterprise" are mainly large central enterprises and state-owned enterprises such as State Power Investment, Huaneng, National Energy Group, and Datang. However, their participation in the "scramble war" for rooftop distributed photovoltaic resources is not a free competition in the market, but to exclude private enterprises by suspending filings and granting relevant state-owned enterprises the right to develop exclusively.
The Beijing News commented in "Regulating rooftop photovoltaics can not harm "fair competition"" that rooftop photovoltaics have nothing to do with the lifeblood of the national economy and national security, and should be a free competitive industry. As a local government, it has no right to favor one over the other and deprive private enterprises of the opportunity to participate. Some of the problems that have emerged at present are obviously contrary to state laws and policies, and there is a suspicion of competing for the interests of the people, and it is appropriate to correct them as soon as possible.
This is only a corner of the chaos of rooftop PV projects. With distributed photovoltaics gradually becoming an important starting point for expanding the application scale of photovoltaic power generation in China, in the roof grab war, whether it is central enterprises or private enterprises, they must also face the problem of power grid consumption.
Recently, the Hunan Changde Municipal Development and Reform Commission suspended the filing of new photovoltaic power generation projects. The explanation in the notice is that the declared projects in each district, county and city far exceed the consumption capacity of the power grid.
In fact, as early as July this year, a message on the official website of the National Energy Administration caused concern: "Zhumadian Power Grid Company is still connected to photovoltaic power generation at 25% of the capacity of the transformer, and such a provision is not a restriction on carbon peaking and carbon neutrality?" "Why can the proportion of household photovoltaic grid-connected transformer capacity in other provinces and cities be increased to 80%, while we have been stuck at 25%?"
The reasons behind this are not difficult to explain. For a long time, China's power transmission process has been centralized production capacity, centralized transmission of the Internet, centralized inter-network dispatch, decentralized transmission and energy supply, which is the construction logic of the entire power grid and the calculation logic of the power grid load.
Now after pushing the entire county rooftop photovoltaic, the power transmission process will become - decentralized production capacity, decentralized transmission of the Internet, centralized inter-network scheduling, decentralized functions. This makes the original grid construction logic and load design logic, may be unable to adapt to the 'photovoltaic power generation' of the decentralized capacity and decentralized transmission of new energy methods. In the third- and fourth-tier cities in the country, their power infrastructure is relatively backward, and they simply do not have the ability and team to rebuild and reconstruct the power system.
In addition, the rooftop photovoltaics that rush up use very little electricity during the day, but the peak period of photovoltaic power generation is during the day. The user can not use up the electricity, is transmitted to the Internet, if a certain threshold is exceeded, the inverter and other components may fail or even burn out.
At the same time, after the "scramble" for roof resources has started, it is gradually exposing the imperfection of rules and the lag of supervision, such as the safety hazards of some rooftop photovoltaic facilities and the inability to keep up with the later maintenance. Even, there are photovoltaic manufacturers using information asymmetry to fool farmers blindly, the so-called "photovoltaic loans" can not help the poor, but to help the rich.
The Development and Reform Bureau of Shaoguan City, Guangdong Province, stipulates that in addition to distributed rooftop photovoltaic projects for residents, shaoguan city will suspend the filing and construction of all commercial rooftop photovoltaic projects.
Objectively speaking, the promotion of photovoltaic in the whole county is a new format, which requires the coordinated promotion of competent departments, local governments, industries, enterprises and other parties, and in the short term, it also needs to be piloted, corrected and formed. The existence cycle of photovoltaic projects is as long as 25 years, and it is necessary to follow the principles of top-level design, pilot, step-by-step implementation, and overall effectiveness from top to bottom.
The suspension of rooftop photovoltaic power generation projects in many places is also a sequelae of "blindfolded running". From a long-term point of view, to the current "overheated" photovoltaic industry and capital market "pour a water", the roof photovoltaic in the throes may usher in the inflection point of industry standardization.
Photovoltaic systems can generally be divided into centralized and distributed. Centralized photovoltaic power plants generally refer to the use of deserts, Gobi and other areas with good resource conditions, centralized construction of large-scale photovoltaic power plants, direct integration of power generation into the public power grid, access to high-voltage transmission systems to supply long-distance loads; distributed photovoltaic refers to the construction of photovoltaic power generation facilities near the user site, users spontaneously use themselves, excess electricity on the Internet. Among them, distributed photovoltaics divide the division of labor into commercial projects and household projects.
Previously, China vigorously developed centralized photovoltaic power stations and was facing some problems: First, installation space. According to estimates, the new 6 billion kilowatts of wind power photovoltaic installed capacity will require 100 million mu of land. The second is effective consumption. Unlike thermal power, wind power and photovoltaics are not easy to regulate, and their changes are inconsistent with the demand for electricity, how to coordinate the relationship between power supply and electric load, so as to effectively consume its power generation, is the key to the current development of wind power and photovoltaics. Third, energy storage technology is limited. China's early energy storage method is mainly physical energy storage, electrochemical energy storage started late. And the cost, both physically and electrochemically, is very high.
Therefore, in the past five years, the overall performance of centralized photovoltaics has not been good, but distributed photovoltaics have a strong momentum with the characteristics of "spontaneous self-use, surplus electricity on the Internet". Since the first quarter of this year, the newly installed capacity of distributed photovoltaics has exceeded that of centralized photovoltaics.
To some extent, in addition to policy promotion, the current "hot" rooftop photovoltaic industry is also the result of the overall optimization and adjustment of China's photovoltaic track. This also means that after seven or eight years of difficult development in China, the segment of tens of trillions of yuan will be launched.
At present, the main technical routes of rooftop photovoltaics are divided into two: BAPV and BIPV.
BAPV, that is, the traditional way, installs photovoltaic modules on the surface of existing buildings to generate electricity; BIPV, that is, photovoltaic building integration, is a technology that integrates solar power generation products into buildings, and photovoltaics themselves are part of the building, and have the functions of buildings and power generation at the same time.
According to the conservative calculation of Tianfeng Securities, the potential roof area of BIPV every year includes renovated roofs + new roofs of about 1.23 billion square meters, assuming that the photovoltaic panel power is 200w/square meter, and the potential installed capacity is 245 GW. Assuming that the PRICE of BIPV is 5.5 yuan / w, the corresponding market space is 1.3 trillion yuan. Although BIPV has developed slowly due to cost and technology, and has not yet been commercially applied on a large scale, the imagination space is huge.
At present, rooftop distributed photovoltaic projects are mostly built in the traditional form of BAPV, mainly facing areas with rich roof resources, schools, hospitals, and rooftops for rural residents.
However, with the significant reduction in the cost of photovoltaic modules, real estate developers, especially those with a large number of holding properties, have also begun to turn their attention to their own rooftops. According to incomplete statistics, at present, Vanke, Shimao, Xincheng, Wanda and other large housing enterprises have entered the bureau or declared to promote roof distributed generation projects.
From the perspective of energy conservation and emission reduction in the construction field, China's construction industry has lagged behind in green development for at least 10 years. Promoting the greening of public buildings is an inevitable choice. Under the goal of "double carbon", the general tone of the future of rooftop photovoltaics will not change.
From the industry point of view, photovoltaic power generation as one of the important bearing contents of the new energy revolution, the ultimate goal will be the same as the new energy automobile industry, from the B-end to the C-end transition, and eventually driven by the market, the photovoltaic market as a whole will be in an upward period. However, for investors, most of the targets of the photovoltaic sector have overdrawn their stock prices in advance due to the sharp rise in the short term, and there is a greater risk.