We assessed Chi­na’s solar resources by uti­liz­ing 10-year of hourly solar irra­di­a­tion of 200 sites.

• We built ana­lyt­ic provin­cial scale solar avail­abil­i­ty pro­files for China.

• Chi­na has a poten­tial sta­tion­ary solar capac­i­ty from 4700 GW in the low­er case.

• We observed sim­i­lar sea­son­al and diur­nal vari­a­tion pat­tern of solar avail­abil­i­ty cross China.

Abstract
Inte­grat­ing vari­able ener­gy resources, notably solar and wind, requires bet­ter under­stand­ing of where, when and how much of vari­able resources are avail­able. Chi­na’s ambi­tious solar ener­gy devel­op­ment goal will be great­ly facil­i­tat­ed by the resources assess­ment at high­er spa­tial and tem­po­ral res­o­lu­tion. We uti­lized 10-year hourly solar irra­di­a­tion data from 2001 to 2010 from 200 rep­re­sen­ta­tive loca­tions to devel­op provin­cial solar avail­abil­i­ty pro­files. We found that Chi­na has a poten­tial sta­tion­ary solar capac­i­ty from 4700 GW to 39300 GW, dis­trib­uted solar about 200 GW, and the annu­al solar out­put could reach 6900 TWh to 70100 TWh. Resources are most con­cen­trat­ed in north­west provinces, topped by Inner Mon­go­lia, Xin­jiang and Gan­su. The chal­lenge of solar devel­op­ment in Chi­na is inte­gra­tion rather than resources. The spa­tial and tem­po­ral vari­a­tion of the solar resource show an effi­cient, robust, and inter-con­nect­ed nation­al grid and sound ener­gy plan­ning would be nec­es­sary to facil­i­tate the inte­gra­tion of these vast­ly avail­able but vari­able solar resources.