30 Million Solar Water Heaters

Reuters: Dusty Dezhou was relegated to the footnotes of Chinese history for centuries, known mainly as the place where a Filipino king died.
Now, Huang Ming hopes hot water will help put it on the map.
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 percent of the world market, said Eric Martinot, visiting scholar at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. “We are at 15 to 20 percent 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 percent.
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.
Energy-hungry China warms to solar water heaters [Reuters]