# Assessment of Air-Pollution Control Policy's Impact on China's PV Power: A System Dynamics Analysis
## 1 Introduction  
China's increasingly serious air-pollution problem is caused by its unreasonable energy developing pattern and the lack of pollution-controlling consciousness [1; 2]. In September 2013, the Chinese government has introduced a severe policy named _The Action Plan for Air Pollution Control_, which shows the beginning of powerful air-pollution management. To drive the implementation of this action plan, China's energy industry introduced several supporting policies, which mention the necessity of adjusting energy structure. Among all the renewable energy generation technologies, photovoltaic (PV) power generation is regarded as the most perspective one because of its perfect match in time to the industry electrical load [3; 4; 5; 6; 7]. Then, China's solar power industry issued _Some Suggestions to Improving PV Industry Development_ to match the requirement of air-pollution controlling for PV power industry. These air-pollution control policies fully indicate the prominent position that PV power hold in improving atmosphere environment and promoting energy substitution. The macrolevel policies will increase the relative demand of PV power generation by limiting coal consumption. In addition, microlevel policies will complete the electricity price and subsidy mechanism of PV power, give priority to the generation scheduling of PV power, and implement the full acquisition of PV power generation. This favor policy environment will bring China's PV power an unprecedented developing opportunity [8; 9]. However, on the other hand, the high targets for installed PV capacity set in these policies will bring PV power great challenges as well [10; 11]. China's PV power is growing rapidly now, with installed-capacity growing by 60% and generation growing by 200% year on year. However, in 2014, China's installed PV capacity reached only 28,050 MW accounting for less than 1% of the totalcapacity. In addition, the newly-added capacity met only 76% of the national target. Thus, whether these air-pollution policies can give China's PV power an expected boost remains to be studied further. These air-pollution control policies contain many policy measures, which can impact every factors involved in developing system of PV power from several perspectives. It will be of great significance for assessing the impact of China's air-pollution control polices to analyze the pathway and effect of each policy measure. Whether the modification of policy measures and targets are necessary can be determined by comparing the actual effects and expected effects. Further, analyzing the sensitivities of technical, economic and environmental indicators to specific policy measures is helpful to suggesting improvements for next policy making. Many scholars have realized that air-pollution policies will have long-reaching effects on energy structure [12; 13; 14; 15; 16]. Other scholars have simulated the development of renewable energy resource including PV power under the influence of some energy-saving and renewable energy development policies in different countries [17; 18; 19; 20; 21; 22]. However, none of these models considered China's latest air-pollution policies, so they could not be applied to China's current policy environment. The assessment of air-pollution control policy's impact on PV power is a complex dynamic evolution process, because the policy has many acting points, and the policy effects will keep transmitting along the intricate structure of PV power development system, which consists of many elements in many fields. System dynamics (SD) method can not only model system's real behavior but also explain the relationship between main variables within the system [17]. SD model has been used to assess the development of energy system [23; 24; 25] and national policies [26; 27; 28; 29]. It enables us to stimulate generation increase, investment surge, capacity expansion, costs decline and composition change of China's PV power under the influence of air-pollution control policies.