Abstract
The sharp reduction in unelectrified households in China, particularly over the last 20 years has been remarkable. From hundreds of millions of people without access, China had perhaps 15–20 million people without access to electricity at the time of this research and 8 million today (IEA 2009). The central government has even established criteria by which counties are judged to be “electrified,” including minimum levels of consumption.
*Information on Distributed Rural Electrification Models in China comes from a combination of secondary sources and primary interviews conducted in China (March 2005, May/June 2005, December 2005) and Washington, DC (2005 and 2006).
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Notes
- 1.
Requirements include 90% of the rural households have access to electricity for lighting, broadcasting, TV round the year and cooking seasonally, and for irrigation, food processing and TVEs. On average, per capita electricity consumption is around 200 kwh and generation capacity at 100 W.c. Details are given in GB (National Standards)/T 15659–1955.
- 2.
At least one entrepreneur, however, was also a former local Ministry of Water official. It would be interesting to see if firms that are profitable are those that are better able to straddle both the markets and the political system, similar to the “dual firms” found in research on large independent power producers.
- 3.
In the systems installed by one of the contracted companies, user fees ranged from Yuan 0.4 to 1/kWh ($.05–0.12/kWh). These revenues were collected by the townships from 99% of households, but government buildings and schools were not charged. The low consumption of rural users also meant that even though a tariff was charged, revenue was low. CH.Ind.Ren (May, 2005). Author Interview with Renewable Electricity Entrepreneur. Beijing, China.
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Zerriffi, H. (2011). Distributed Rural Electrification in China. In: Rural Electrification. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9594-7_5
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