Canadian Solar, which just posted strong second-quarter financial results, wants a slice of the promising Chinese market, too.

The company (NSDQ: CSIQ) said Friday it plans to create a joint venture with Guodian Power Development to develop solar projects in Gansu, Ningxia and Inner Mongolia.

Although Canadian Solar is headquartered in Canada's Ontario province, all of its factories are in China. The company is vertically integrated and makes silicon ingots, wafers, solar cells and panels.

China has become a hot solar market – at least on paper. The Chinese government has announced plans to subsidize power projects in recent months. Since then, there has been a steady stream of announcements by Chinese solar companies and power producers to work on installing hundreds of megawatts over the next few years.

These project announcements have attracted no shortage of skepticism from analysts. Some say the project timelines seem overly ambitious. Others wonder if Chinese companies have adequate project development and construction experiences to do a good job.  The country is a big producer and exporter of solar energy equipment, but it has less than 100 megawatts of solar energy generation capacity.

Guodian is a power plant developer/owner and a subsidiary of the state-owned China Guodian Corp. It has nearly 7.5 gigawatts in installed capacity as of the end of June, including 325.6 megawatts in wind, said Canadian Solar.

Guodian apparently wants to install 510 megawatts of solar power plants by 2012.

Under the agreement signed with Guodian, Canadian Solar would sell solar panels and provide engineering, procurement and construction services. The two companies plan to start by developing two projects in Ningxia. Each project would be built in phases. They would install 10 megawatts for the first phase.