In the first nine months of 2016, China's exports of photovoltaic modules and batteries to some emerging countries and island countries have accumulated to $ 3 billion, equivalent to about 6.8GW of photovoltaic cells and components. Representing a 20% increase over the same period last year, accounting for one-third of China's total PV exports.
However, in 2016 the above-mentioned large-scale photovoltaic installations in the importing countries only slightly higher than the 4.1GW, which means that these emerging markets in China PV export volume is much higher than the local demand for large-scale photovoltaic projects. Therefore, in these emerging markets, some of the imported PV modules should be used for the construction of small PV systems, although simply can not be inferred by the exact amount of imports for the number of small PV systems, but we can still make a rough Evaluation.
We estimate that since January 2015 in the emerging countries, small-scale photovoltaic projects in the market size of 1.4 to 2.0GW between. The data has excluded some of the transit shipments in these countries, or for large-scale long-term project construction under construction.
Pakistan and Nigeria are among the largest emerging markets for small-scale PV systems, not surprisingly given the large population of these two countries and the unreliability of grid supplies. In other countries, it is more difficult to predict: Yemen imported $ 68 million worth of PV modules (equivalent to about 120MW of PV cells and modules) since January 2015, mainly for residential PV systems; Bangladesh, Myanmar, Ghana And the Dominican Republic and other markets PV module imports, far more than we based on the current project planning and to make predictions. West Africa seems to have a lot of small-scale photovoltaic system building.
Some of the above countries have so far not built any large-scale PV power plants, but last year's distributed PV capacity imports have accumulated a considerable scale. In addition, the expansion of small-scale PV systems in these countries also reflects the Chinese manufacturers to Yemen and other difficult areas such as the expansion of the market is also very fast. Small-scale retailers are the main representatives of these areas of photovoltaic product sales. By contrast, China's exports to these emerging countries, the average value of photovoltaic products was 137,000 US dollars, while the mature market to an average of 22.1 million US dollars. Many African countries are well below the average for emerging countries.
