Solar energy pays

"Solar energy businesses can increase in value even faster than oil wells," said Australian entrepreneur and scientist Dr Zhengrong Shi.

"There are huge commercial opportunities in solar energy, but to make money from them you need good technology, good business practice and supportive government policy."

Shi, formerly a researcher at the University of NSW, was offered "a few million dollars' of seed capital by Wuxi province in China in 2000 to set up a photovoltaic manufacturing company there. That company, Suntech Power, now turns over US$500 million in 2006.

"Although Australia has lost its world lead in developing a solar energy industry, it is not too late to catch up," Shi told the annual conference of the Australia and New Zealand Solar Energy Society in Canberra.

"But we have to think long term and in a more creative way. Australia has the best solar technology. And we have got so much sunshine."

Our coal and gas will only become more valuable with time, so why sell it off so quickly? "We should exploit our renewable energy and save the resources for the future," he said.

Many factors, including China's determination to attract its brightest minds back from overseas to help create new high-tech businesses, have contributed to Shi's good fortune.

"I was lucky to be the right person at the right spot at the right time, with both the technological and business skills and able to move in both Chinese and Western cultures," said Shi.

"Managing your intellectual property is critical, and it can be done, even in China, as the success of Suntech shows."

His company's rapid expansion has also been fuelled by rising global demand for solar cells, as governments in countries such as Germany and Japan have embraced clean energy.

"The [Australian] government has short-sightedly chosen to subsidise LPG, which is more or less just another form of the depleting fossil resource of oil, when it could have used the same funds to further encourage the use of clean solar energy," said the chair of the Solar Energy Society, Mahalath Halperin.