The National Energy Administration ("NEA") has recently issued the Circular on Matters Concerning Easing Burden of Enterprises in Renewable Energy Sector (the "Circular"), immediately effective from the issue date.
The Circular calls for implementing the Renewable Energy Law to ensure the healthy development of the renewable energy sector, optimizing investment environment to reduce costs of renewable energy exploitation, improving the government's public services, such as "streamlining administration, delegating power, improving regulation and optimizing services", to vitalize the market, and improving administration of this sector to relieve burden in investment and business activities. Further, the Circular stipulates that, the guaranteed purchase regime for power generated through renewable energy shall be fully implemented, adding that if renewable energy power generation projects, including wind power generation, photovoltaic power generation and biomass power generation, conform to the state planning, fall within the annual construction scale allocated by the competent energy authority of the State Council, have been included by the provincial energy authority into the annual implementing plan, and satisfy relevant policies of the state in respect of the guaranteed buying of renewable energy, monitoring and warning mechanism for industry investment environment, and monitoring and assessment mechanism for market environment, power grid enterprises shall promptly accept applications for on-grid connection for such projects and set a definite time limit to work out the on-grid connection plan.