"The amount of rooftop solar plants and projects aimed at easing poverty were more than expected and developers rushed to build some ground-mounted solar projects before they have been allocated subsidies," said Yvonne Liu, a BNEF analyst in Beijing.

New estimates for 2018 are 55 GW for China's solar power installations.

In 2016, China installed 123 GW of electricity production. 34 GW of it was solar.
281 TWh was added in 2016. 28TWh was solar.

The 54 GW of solar installed in 2017 will likely generate 44 TWh.
China would need to reach 340 GW of solar installation for all the new power generation to be replaced by solar.