Huang helps keep China's sky blue

The successful businessman that the Chinese now call 'the solar king' is an energetic former oil-industry engineer who has created the country's largest maker of solar water heating systems and sees more clean technology on the horizon.

Fearful that his newborn daughter would have no blue sky to look at when she grew up, Huang Ming, who the Chinese now call "the solar king", started to build prototype solar-powered water heaters.

This energetic, chatty engineer makes for an unlikely eco-warrior. The 51-year-old once helped make equipment for the oil industry but these days he runs one of China's biggest solar power companies and has become a fervent ambassador of renewable energies. "I have a dream," Mr Huang says. "Sometimes you can be disappointed but when we keep following our dreams, everybody's life becomes meaningful. Once your dream involves more and more people, the dream is more likely to become real."

We are talking in Dezhou, a dusty city in Shandong province, and an unlikely spot to stage a green energy revolution. It is a nondescript place in the dust belt of China's north-east, heavily industrial and fairly miserable. But to see why Mr Huang chose the city to become a capital of renewable energy, you need only look up into the blazing sunlight. "The sun doesn't run out, you know," he says, winking and pointing overhead.

His transformation from a Big Oil official to solar salesman came more than two decades ago while he was involved in oil drilling and research. He had a revelation as he was about to become a father to a daughter. "I realised that my work, until the end of my life, would have no meaning because the oil would run out," Mr Huang says. "I felt guilty that my job was to accelerate the exploration of oil. After she was born, I worried about there being no blue sky and white clouds for her to see, so I changed my thinking from oil to solar power."

He started off experimenting with solar hot water heaters and gave them to friends. "Then I gave one to a friend of a friend at a wedding and he asked for a load more," Mr Huang says. "Suddenly, I was asked to supply a factory. When it starts to become a business, the dream becomes real." It took a decade for him to quit the oil business but in 1995 he founded Himin Solar Energy Group. "Just as you have Silicon Valley in America, here in China, we have Solar Valley," Mr Huang says, pointing at Himin's giant headquarters, which looks at a distance like a huge football stadium.

When you get closer you see that the huge arc soaring up from the landscape is instead a vast fan shape of solar panels that surrounds the Sun-Moon Mansion, his headquarters. Originally from Taixing in Jiangsu province, Mr Huang in 1982 was assigned to Dezhou to study oil drilling at the Institute of Geology. Today, he has transformed his adoptive home. About 70 per cent of heating and lighting needs in Dezhou, a city of 5.6 million inhabitants, comes from solar power.

"This is the biggest building in the world to use solar power as a major energy source," he says proudly of his headquarters. As we leave Sun-Moon Mansion for the factory, Mr Huang is explaining one of his theories when suddenly he stops. His attention has been has turned by an attractive woman driving a Mercedes through the factory gates. "I wonder if I can get her to marry me," he says, one eyebrow raised. "Wait, that's my wife," he adds, and laughs heartily at his own joke, as he leans from the front seat of the people carrier taking us to the factory.

In Sun-Moon Mansion, the company has solar gadgets galore on display, including torches, phone chargers and even a solar-powered Buddhist prayer wheel. In Himin's cultural museum, there are pictures of Mr Huang alongside images of Albert Einstein and Sir Isaac Newton. The walls are adorned by large posters with Mr Huang's key beliefs, including "I have a dream ? blue sky and white cloud and for later generations".

He clearly has little doubt about his own abilities. Behind the clean-tech crusader image lies a canny businessman. Himin employs 60,000 people, with reported revenues of 2 billion yuan (Dh1.07bn) in 2007. Though Mr Huang insists that China's communist leaders are little involved in his business, he is a member of China's National Party Congress and has advised the government in drafting clean energy legislation.

China is the world's biggest user and producer of solar water heaters, accounting for more than half of the total. Himin is the world's largest producer of rooftop systems, producing one million solar water heaters a year. Despite its status as the world's top emitter of carbon dioxide, China is set on boosting its use of renewable energies as it tries to reduce its reliance on coal. In 2006, Beijing passed the China renewable energy law. The next year it released a renewable energy plan that aims to have 15 per cent of China's energy come from renewable sources by 2020.

As we drive around his company's production facility, Mr Huang complains about the large number of cars in China. Much of the transport around the facility is on solar-powered golf carts, which give the place the feel of a James Bond villain's lair. Despite being down on cars, he does have a lingering admiration for the vision of the great US car-making pioneers. "We want to be like Ford was to the automobile industry," he explains. "We borrowed a lot of ideas from the automobile industry, mostly about how to automate efficiently."

As Mr Huang gives a PowerPoint presentation describing his company, you get a taste of the charisma that has attracted the favour of international investors. Goldman Sachs is investing in Himin and the group is seeking an initial public offering. Mr Huang boasts of the high levels of efficiency his products and how the solar heaters work even in areas with a lot of cloud, such as the huge Chinese city of Chongqing, which is famous for its rain and overcast skies.

Himin solar systems already can be seen on rooftops all over the country. Rural China, which has nearly 30,000 small towns and villages, is a major focus for future developments. Prices range from between 1,500 and 3,000 yuan for a basic solar water-heating system, rising to 20,000 yuan for a more sophisticated one. These can heat everything from a small farmer's shack to one of the large suburban villas springing up outside Beijing.

Himin solar heaters are also part of many of the new housing complexes and commercial buildings in China. The company has installed solar panels at the Olympic Velodrome and its panels even heat the water at the "Mao-soleum", where chairman Mao Zedong's body is preserved in the Chinese capital city. The market for solar water heaters in China was valued at 32bn yuan in 2007, which is attracting new producers all the time.

There are more than 20 other companies that make solar water heaters with a combined annual output valued at more than 100 million yuan. One of them is Shi Zhengrong's Suntech, but Mr Huang insists there is opportunity for everyone. "We avoid use of the word competition because this market is like a vast ocean with only a few boats," he says. "Are you competing with other fishermen in a vast ocean? The only competition is ourselves, we don't blame others."Mr Huang is constantly on the move. He says he likes to keep things simple so he can keep things moving.

"Too many people like big things, complicated things," he says. "Sometimes the whole world is crazy." He also espouses a respect for things that take time, in nearly the same breath. Lunch on this day is a local speciality called "Thousand Year Chicken", first described during the Song dynasty (960-1279), in which is a whole chicken cleaned and stuffed into an earthenware pot, then cooked very slowly.

For all his success, Mr Huang is not without critics. Environmentalists say he has pushed up the price of solar heaters in rural areas. The environmental group Greenpeace, meanwhile, recently released a report praising Himin and Mr Huang, saying the work he did in Dezhou showed that solar power and other forms of renewable energy could become a reality in the modern city. The centrepiece of Himin's plans is Utopia Garden, a vast apartment complex where you can find the International Exchange Centre (IEC), which will host next year's International Solar Cities Congress.

It is described as a "five-star solar harmonious homeland" with 2,000 apartments, a solar-powered heated swimming pool and a solar methane system. Pointing out an apartment on the model, Mr Huang says: "I'm moving in myself. That's where my family will live. And it all comes from the sun." [e-mail]