Energy-hungry China warms to solar water heaters

His company has earned a fortune manufacturing solar heaters, relatively low-tech rooftop devices which capture the sun’s energy to provide water for baths and washing and are at the forefront of a renewable energy drive.

At least 30 million Chinese households now have one and last year the country accounted for around 80 per cent of the world market, said Eric Martinot, visiting scholar at

Beijing’s Tsinghua University. ‘‘We are at 15 to 20 per cent annual growth and I don’t see that slowing down.’’

Huang says his Dezhou-based firm, China Himin Solar Energy Group, is the largest in a fragmented and almost entirely Chinese market, with a share of around 14 per cent.

And the mayor is using his heating success as the basis for a bid to follow British University town Oxford and Australia’s Adelaide as host of an international solar congress.

Cheap and effective enough to make economic sense to middle-class urbanites, Huang’s basic models start at around 1,500 yuan ($190), although for a luxury home this could rise to 18,000 yuan ($2,250).

With technology so efficient they can work at temperatures well below freezing and under cloudy or smog-choked skies, they soon pay for themselves, he says.

Demand from house-buyers is forcing many builders to include the heaters in new blocks, and a government pledge that all buildings in major cities will be revamped to make them more energy efficient by 2020 should mean further customers.

Wind power generation, or more familiar solar panels used to generate electricity, are expensive and usually need government subsidies to take off. The heaters have spread far faster.

All have the same basic design, a row of sunlight-capturing glass pipes angled below an insulated water tank.

The relatively low-tech factory floor helps keep costs down to around $120 to $150 per square meter, well below the $700 to $800 charged for similar heaters in Europe.

The simplicity of the model has also encouraged a lot of small start-ups — some, though, of dubious quality.

‘‘It’s a very fragmented industry, although they employ about 250,000 people, which is about an eighth of the total in all of China’s renewable energy industry,’’ said Martinot. ‘‘We might start to see centralization into a few bigger players,’’ he added, with stronger firms helping build up exports, which are currently negligible.

Himin will almost certainly be one of the new powerhouses. Huang says revenues will expand 80 to 100 per cent this year, although he declined to give figures in yuan.

Emma Graham-Harrison