Using Grounded Theory to Identify the Key Factors Constraining China’s Distributed Solar PV Development

Vigorously developing distributed solar PV is an important way to accelerate China's energy transformation and upgrading and achieve the "dual carbon" goal. China has sufficient sunlight resources, but by the end of 2020 the installed capacity of solar PV accounted for only 11.52% of the total in the country, of which distributed solar PV account for 3.56%. This paper firstly uses grounded theory (GT) to identify various factors restricting the development of distributed solar PV in China, and performs three levels of manual coding for these factors; then, it established a dual influence relationship between the various constraints based on the literature research; after that, using the interpretive structure model (ISM) to divide these constraints into five levels, thus forming the path of influence between the various levels of constraints; finally, based on the analysis results of ISM, and adopting the MICMAC, the key factors restricting the development of distributed solar PV in China are identified: air problems, roof life problems, unclear roof property rights, insufficient subsidy funds, uncertain value in the future, and immature auxiliary power services market.