Elsevier

Energy

Volume 201, 15 June 2020, 117631
Energy

Has solar PV achieved the national poverty alleviation goals? Empirical evidence from the performances of 52 villages in rural China

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2020.117631Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We verified the impact of solar PV poverty alleviation using DEA and GRA.

  • Solar PV poverty alleviation projects play a minor role in poverty alleviation.

  • China’s solar PV poverty alleviation projects have unreasonable distributions.

  • We shed a new light on evaluating the contribution of solar PV in rural China.

Abstract

As a momentous energy policy innovation endowed with the highest level of political support in China, the solar PV poverty alleviation project (PPAP) combines the development of clean energy with poverty alleviation, which was promoted together with the other five targeted poverty alleviation methods intensively. Nevertheless, is solar PV efficient for poverty alleviation in rural China? How much does PPAP contribute to poor villages compared with other methods? In this paper, we explored the PPAPs performance on the improvement of economic, social, ecological and infrastructure construction, by using the field survey data in 52 poor villages in 8 provinces throughout China and adopting methodologies of principal component analysis (PCA), data envelopment analysis (DEA) and grey relation analysis (GRA). The results indicate that: (1) The six poverty alleviation models have made positive contributions to poverty alleviation, and the PPAP ranks the last but one; (2) PPAP plays a minor role in poverty alleviation, suggesting that greater investment in PPAP will have little impact on the efficiency of poverty reduction in rural China; (3) limiting factors in achieving high poverty alleviation efficiency are insufficient scales and unreasonable investment distribution, and (4) Great regional differences exist in poverty reduction efficiency.

Introduction

Under the circumstances of the energy crisis and environmental pollution, solar PV power generation has been considered as one of the most promising energy conversion modalities for its environmental protection, recycling and renewable advantages. As the second-largest carbon emitter in the world, China has been developing solar energy progressively in the past decade. In order to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, solar PV power generation has become an important trend in the development of China’s energy system and has been greatly supported by the Chinese government due to its huge poverty alleviation potential [1,2]. Since 2014, the Chinese government has assigned more than 130,000 working groups to poor villages to help them rise out of poverty, created profiles for 89 million people in poverty and proposed a goal of lifting 100% of the rural poor out of poverty by 2020 [3]. A total of 70 million people still live below the poverty line of 1.9 USD/day in 2014 [4]. Targeted poverty alleviation in China refers to promoting the economic, social, ecological environment and infrastructure development of poor villages by implementing poor household-specific methods according to local conditions, thus enabling these poor villages to be self-reliant and sustainable in the long run [5,6].

Since 2014, the PPAP has been regarded as one of the most important ways to alleviate poverty in rural China, by deploying distributed solar photovoltaic (PV) system in poor areas to help alleviate poverty and stabilize rural power supplies, in an effort to benefit more than 2 million households in about 35,000 villages across the country from solar PV power generation by 2020 [7]. The revenue generated from this solar PV system can bring about 3000 yuan per year to a single adopted household. The duration of government subsidies is 20 years, which ensures the long-term benefits of solar PV projects for poverty alleviation [7,8]. The PPAP program has two main models. One model is the distributed solar PV power plant for poverty alleviation. Specifically, the government built small PV plants on the roofs of or the ground near the poor households. The poor households can obtain incomes by selling solar electricity to the State Grid. The other model is the centralized solar PV power station for poverty alleviation, which is built on the waste mountain slopes near the village. The economic benefits brought by the solar PV power generation could help poor households out of poverty and strengthen the village collective economy as well [9].

In 2018, China added 44.26 million kilowatts of installed capacity, including 23.3 million kilowatts for centralized and 20.96 million kilowatts for distributed solar PV systems. China’s cumulative PPAPs installed capacity has reached 174.45 million kilowatts, including 123.84 million kilowatts for centralized and 50.61 million kilowatts for distributed solar PV power generation systems respectively. Fig. 1 shows the installed capacity of solar PV power generation and the poverty alleviation rate in China from 2010 to 2018 [10]. As shown in Fig. 1, the installed capacity of solar PV power generation in China has been continuously increasing during the past seven years, and it has entered a stage of rapid development since 2013, which has laid a technical and practical foundation for the PPAP. Furthermore, it was not until 2014 that the poverty alleviation rate resumed and began to increase, indicating the poverty reduction performance is accelerating, which is consistent with the implementation period of PPAP.

Since PPAPs just started a few years ago, the relevant regulatory experience system of PPAPs is not mature, but the investment scale is expanding rapidly. By the end of 2018, China has invested 17.143 billion dollars in PPAPs, furthermore, the investment will reach 28.571 billion dollars by 2020 [11]. Therefore, it is urgent and necessary to evaluate the poverty alleviation performance of PPAP, in an attempt to avoid irrational investment in this program and the waste of resources.

This paper focuses on the contribution of China’s PPAP on poverty alleviation efficiency of economic, social, ecological and infrastructure construction in poor villages, in an attempt to provide a new insight into sustainable energy development in the context of targeted poverty alleviation. PPAPs, together with the Microfinancing or Interest Subsidized Loans (MISL) projects, Whole Village Approach (WVA) projects, Relocating the Poor (RP) projects, Social Security Poverty Alleviation (SSPA) projects and Other Industry-based Poverty Alleviation (OIPA) projects had been promoted on a large scale in 52 poor villages in 8 provinces. Our research team has conducted a 4-month large-scale field survey in these 8 provinces of China, and obtained the poverty reduction efficiency of poor villages under six poverty alleviation models from 2014 to 2017, shedding new light on evaluating the contribution of PPAPs to poverty reduction efficiency, and put forward policy recommendations. This research is of great significance for improving the investment decision-making scheme of solar PV poverty alleviation and promoting the sustainable development of renewable energy in China.

The remainder of this study is organized as follows: Section 2 presents a review of relevant studies about performance evaluation of solar energy and poverty alleviation. Section 3 explains the data sources and research methods. Section 4 evaluates the poverty alleviation efficiency of 52 villages in 8 provinces of China, and analyzes the contribution of PPAPs to poverty reduction compared with other methods. Section 5 discusses the existing problems of PPAP and the uniqueness of this study. Finally, section 6 draws conclusions and proposes policy recommendations.

Section snippets

Literature review

Developing renewable energy and alleviating poverty are increasingly recognized as serious worldwide public concerns. Therefore, a plentiful number of academics have investigated solar PV popularization and poverty alleviation. The literature relevant to this research can be divided into four categories: the performance evaluation of solar PV, poverty alleviation assessment, targeted poverty alleviation strategies to rural poverty and the use of renewable energy for poverty alleviation.

DEA and super-efficiency DEA

Table 7 and Fig. 4 show DEA efficiency values and super-efficiency DEA values for 52 sample villages. The average scores of overall technical efficiency (OTE), pure technical efficiency (PTE), and scale efficiency (SE) are 0.927, 0.979, and 0.947, respectively. The average output can be increased by 2.1% if the sample villages reach the optimal input ratio. Meanwhile, the average output can be increased by 5.3% if the villages reach the optimal production scale. The OTE scores are

Current issues for PPAP

PPAP is in line with the new energy industry policy that China is focusing on, and is strongly supported by the Chinese government [8,123]. In recent years, China has led the resource elements to focus on poor areas through large-scale investment in PPAPs. In the joint official statement of the Central Committee and the State Council, PPAP is considered to be a considerably promising choice to generate income for the rural poor [124]. Despite the high political attention of the state, several

Conclusions

Through the above analyses, we can draw the following conclusions:

  • (1)

    The six poverty alleviation models have made positive contributions to poverty alleviation in 52 sample villages, and their contribution ranks from high to low as follows: The Whole Village Approach (0.7247) > Social Security Poverty Alleviation (0.6754) > Other Industry-based Poverty Alleviation (0.6536) > Micro-financing or Interest Subsidized Loans (0.6393) > Solar PV Poverty Alleviation Program (0.6390) > Relocating the Poor

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Jiaxin Li: Conceptualization, Data curation, Writing - original draft, Formal analysis, Writing - review & editing. Zihan Wang: Data curation, Software, Validation. Xin Cheng: Methodology, Formal analysis. Jing Shuai: Data curation, Supervision, Software, Validation, Writing - review & editing. Chuanmin Shuai: Data curation, Resources, Writing - review & editing, Project administration, Funding acquisition. Jing Liu: Data curation.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the editors and reviewers for their helpful suggestions. This paper is supported by the Major Program of National Social Science Foundation of China (NSSFC): Systematic Evaluation on the Operating Mechanism of Poverty Reduction Performances of Solar PV Projects and Policy Innovations (No.17ZDA085), Projects of Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (No. 71773119 and No. 71903184), Fundamental Research Funds for China’s National Universities (Grant No. CUG170101), hosted

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