Overall review of China׳s thermal power development with emphatic analysis on thermal powers’ cost and benefit

China׳s thermal power industry is now facing some new challenges. The slowing down of the macro economy, the surplus added capacity, low generating hours and the cut of feed-in tariff has now made the decision maker of both government and thermal power enterprises look back and rethink the future development of the whole thermal power industry. In this paper, we give an overall review of China׳s thermal power development based on industry data of the year 2014 and first half year of 2015, followed by a description of the 2015 feed-in tariff adjustment. The feed-in tariff averagely decreased by 0.02Yuan/kWh, subjecting the thermal power enterprises to great income losses. To give a micro review of how the thermal power perform under such circumstances, we also make an emphatic analysis based on the investigated data of six representative thermal power plants. We can see that the unit benefit varied in the range of 0.03–0.08Yuan/kWh, and this indicator may be even lower in 2015 as the adjustment of feed-in tariff. At the end, we also give some suggestions both for the government and the thermal power entities.