Has solar PV achieved the national poverty alleviation goals? Empirical evidence from the performances of 52 villages in rural China

As a momentous energy policy innovation endowed with the highest level of political support in China, the solar PV poverty alleviation project (PPAP) combines the development of clean energy with poverty alleviation, which was promoted together with the other five targeted poverty alleviation methods intensively. Nevertheless, is solar PV efficient for poverty alleviation in rural China? How much does PPAP contribute to poor villages compared with other methods? In this paper, we explored the PPAPs performance on the improvement of economic, social, ecological and infrastructure construction, by using the field survey data in 52 poor villages in 8 provinces throughout China and adopting methodologies of principal component analysis (PCA), data envelopment analysis (DEA) and grey relation analysis (GRA). The results indicate that: (1) The six poverty alleviation models have made positive contributions to poverty alleviation, and the PPAP ranks the last but one; (2) PPAP plays a minor role in poverty alleviation, suggesting that greater investment in PPAP will have little impact on the efficiency of poverty reduction in rural China; (3) limiting factors in achieving high poverty alleviation efficiency are insufficient scales and unreasonable investment distribution, and (4) Great regional differences exist in poverty reduction efficiency.