BEIJING, Jan. 17 (Xinhua) -- After over ten years of development, China’s photovoltaic industry now has gained dominating position in the world in areas including technology, product development, industrial scale and cost control.
Since 2011, however, Europe and the United States began to suppress Chinese manufactured PV products through anti-dumping investigations or the surrogate country system, leading to high tariffs for China's PV products.
Against this context, the Belt and Road Initiative has brought new strategic opportunities for enterprises engaged in renewable energy.
Encouraged by the measures to promote healthy development issued by China’s State Council in 2013, Shunfeng International Clean Energy Ltd. started to expand business in China and overseas markets.
In 2014, the company completed restructuring of Wuxi Suntech Power Co., Ltd. and bought SAG Germany and meteocontrol GmbH. After a series of acquisitions and integration, Shunfeng International has initially formed a complete PV industry chain and is able to provide global customers with comprehensive clean energy solution.
Founded in 1976, meteocontrol provides upgrading and retrofitting solutions that represent holistic solutions for monitoring, grid feed-in management and direct marketing. The company monitors about 41,000 PV systems around the world with a total output of 11 GWp, and is the international leader among independent providers of PV monitoring systems.
In addition to integrating upstream and downstream resources, when developing markets along the Belt and Road, Shunfeng International actively cooperated with Chinese state-owned enterprises and private companies to jointly implement large overseas projects.
According to Shunfeng International CEO Luo Xin, the company signed a strategic cooperation agreement with China General Nuclear Power Corp. (CGN), to take use of CGN’s experience and connections in Europe and Africa as well as the advantages in the financial field to develop the local market.
Shunfeng International also established close partnerships with ZTE Energy Co., Ltd. The acquired meteocontrol participated in ZTE Energy’s 900 mw large ground PV power station project in Pakistan. The contract of the ground PV power station project was signed in April, 2015 and has been included in the priority projects of China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
Located in the Quaid-e-Azam Solar Park of Punjab province, the station covers an area of 4,500 acres with a total investment of more than 1.5 billion U.S. dollars. The project is currently the largest monomer PV power station project. After the project is completed, the station will provide about 1.271 billion kwh of clean electricity every year for local residents.
"When exploring opportunities under the Belt and Road Initiative, there are also huge political risk and economic risk, and this is a key reason why private enterprises are more cautious when investing Belt and Road projects." Luo Xin said, especially as there are uncertainties in geopolitical and economic conditions, threshold of market access, trade barriers, as well as energy, exchange rate and financial credit policies etc. in some countries.
"Financial institutions have their own standards to evaluate risks of the projects in countries along the Belt and Road, and through cooperation with them, a lot of project risks can be controlled." Luo Xin pointed out that in additional to cooperating with partners in the industry when going overseas, companies should also cooperate with China Development, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and other financial institutions.
(By Yang Qi, Liu Yulong, kateqiyang@xinhua.org)
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