We will increase the domestic demand for photovoltaic products, optimize the energy structure, reduce pollution by energy conservation and emission reduction, and promote employment and income growth for farmers. Talking about the role of “PV for poverty alleviation”, the National People’s Congress (NPC) representatives from China’s “City of Photovoltaic” and Ma Yufeng, mayor of Baoding, Hebei, are very famous. However, he believes that there are still three major “stumbling blocks” to be moved in the promotion of realism in order to promote the real good and fast development of photovoltaic poverty alleviation.

The photovoltaic industry is one of the few sunrise industries in China with global competitiveness. Baoding has a globally renowned photovoltaic industry giant such as Yingli. In October last year, the National Energy Administration and the State Council Poverty Alleviation Office issued a notice and decided to carry out PV pilot work in 6 provinces and regions including Anhui, Hebei, Shanxi and Ningxia.

“This policy will effectively combine poverty alleviation development with photovoltaic applications and have broad prospects.” Ma Yufeng said that currently, photovoltaic poverty alleviation mainly includes three modes: photovoltaic uphill, photovoltaic down-field, and photovoltaic access, that is, through the construction of mountainous photovoltaic power stations and agricultural greenhouses. And rooftop distributed photovoltaic implementation. There are many mountain farms and agricultural greenhouses in Hebei Province. The three modes can effectively promote the increase of farmers' income.

However, in the actual operation, some obstacles and problems need to be solved. Ma Yufeng said that the government and enterprises have a high degree of enthusiasm for "PV helps the poor," but rural awareness is not enough. In particular, agricultural and photovoltaic complementation and home-distributed photovoltaic poverty alleviation model, many farmers are skeptical about the power generation capacity, revenue, and subsidies of photovoltaic facilities, and it is temporarily unacceptable for tens of thousands of PV power stations to be installed.

In addition, the planning of the land, forestry, and power sectors is not uniform, which also increases the difficulty of the development of the photovoltaic industry. For example, in the same land, the national land plan is unused land and the forestry plan is suitable for forest land. The development of the photovoltaic industry and the planning and construction of power grids have been misaligned in time, and they have not been effectively connected. This has also led to difficulty in the approval of grid access.

Ma Yufeng suggested that the State should improve its policies and measures such as PV subsidies for poverty alleviation and planning convergence, adapt to local conditions and vary from case to case, so as to make it more operational and pertinent. Fog and haze in Hebei Province are frequent and poverty alleviation tasks are arduous. In the construction of photovoltaic power plants, the upper limit of development scale should not be set to help poverty alleviation and reduction.