(ECNS) -- Installed distributed photovoltaic (PV) capacity in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, surpassed 10 gigawatts (10,000 MW) on Wednesday, making it the first city in China to reach the 10-GW milestone for distributed PV.

As a major industrial and power-consuming city, Ningbo is accelerating its transition toward greener, low-carbon energy. Most of the city’s distributed PV systems are installed on rooftops, with industrial parks accounting for 84% of the total capacity.

Mi Haiting, an official with the Ningbo Energy Big Data Management Center, said that based on an annual equivalent full-load generation time of 1,000 hours, the city’s distributed PV facilities can generate 10 billion kWh of clean electricity each year, reducing carbon dioxide emissions by around 5 million metric tons — equivalent to planting roughly 120 million trees.

Mi noted that solar power generation can fluctuate sharply over short periods, creating new challenges such as reverse power flows and overloads in distribution networks, mismatches between power supply and demand during peak and off-peak hours, and more complex energy settlement within industrial parks.

Feng Yibin, head of the Technical Innovation Office of State Grid Zhejiang Electric Power Co., Ltd., said the city has developed a county-level, multi-factor grid planning and simulation platform, supported by Ningbo’s Digital-Physical Hybrid Simulation Laboratory for the new-type power system, to address these challenges.

A distributed PV operation monitoring application has also been launched locally.

(By Helen Mo, intern Xu Wenda)