“After outsourcing my lands, I now work at the base and can earn RMB70-80 every day,” said Zhou Zhihua, a resident of the Donggou Town, Funing County, during this Spring Festival. He was confident of his life in the new year, and the base he mentioned is the GCL New Energy Agriculture-PV Complementation Project Base in the town.

Covering an area of 600 mu, the project has a total installed capacity of 15MW and an annual electric energy output of 20 million kWh. Besides using clean energies, GCL New Energy develops crop farming and breeding at the PV power station according to local conditions. The project adopts high supports with flat and single axis, ensuring sufficient floor space and duration of sunshine for crops under the PV panels, and the 8-10m line spacing is suitable for operations of farming machinery.

“Under the same conditions of land and sunlight, PV agriculture helps maximize the utilization of resources and creates a new method for increasing the income of the people,” noted Zhang Yaobang, Vice President of GCL New Energy, under the PV panels there are over 20 vegetable and fruit greenhouses, over 200 mu of oil peony, 20 mu of fish-crab rice field, as well as fields of rice, soybean, maize and rape for rotation, with considerable economic benefits.

The project has provided residents with both high returns for land rental and local employment. Local residents can get land rent and salary. Take Zhou’s family for example, he has transferred his 3-mu farmland to the PV base and can get a rent of RMB3,300 each year, and he and his wife each does part-time jobs for four months every year on average, therefore, his family has an income of nearly RMB30,000, twice or triple the income that he can get if he does the farm work on his own.

GCL New Energy has explored the complementary “rice-fish-crab” model, giving the “PV + Agriculture” model new meaning and achieving the triple output of “electricity, grain and fish”. Xie Gaojing and Cao Zhengrong are contractors of the 20-mu fish-crab rice fields, which had a good harvest of 50kg fishes and 25kg crabs each mu last year. After the spring festival, a new round of fish and crab seeds will be put into the rice paddy. “GCL New Energy will open up another 200 mu fish-crab rice fields this year, register a trademark within two or three years and strive to build into a national demonstration base for agriculture-PV complementation,” said Yin Zhengyi, head for production of the base.