Monthly Archives: May 2017

Smarting Up Electrical Grids

by Debra Fiakas CFA My recent post “Bull Case in Rick Perry’s Grid Study” highlighted efforts by U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry to help the coal industry with a study of the U.S. electrical grid.  Coal has long claimed advantage as a ‘dispatchable’ power source, i.e. a consistently available power source suitable to supply power for the base load.  Technology is making base load less important.  Indeed, modernized or ‘smart’ electrical grids are making it possible to take advantage of low-cost renewable power sources even though they produce power intermittently and are therefore considered ‘not dispatchable’. ...

Amyris: 90 Days To Build The Future

Jim Lane In California, Amyris (AMRS) reported Q1 revenues of $13.0M compared with $8.8M for Q1 2016, and touted the “significant increase in product sales, primarily in the personal care and health and nutrition markets, offset by a slight decline in collaboration revenue.” Collaboration revenues contributed $4.7M and product sales added $8.3M for the quarter. Big Q1 miss vs analyst expectations As Jeff Osborne at Cowen & Co noted, “Amyris reported revenue of $13.0mn, well below our estimate of $37.1mn due to much lower collaboration payments than we had anticipated. Management has highlighted that these payments can...

Ethanol and Biodiesel: Production Cost and Profitability

For a number of years, this (now old and outdated, but) very useful chart has been in circulation in energy circles, mapping the supply of energy to the world by looking not at prices, but at production costs. For one thing, it goes a long way to explaining why the price of oil can tumble so quickly when there is a fall off in demand, and explains why OPEC is troubled by unconventional oil in a way it is not so bothered by other energy sources such as renewable fuels. Renewables not only have been traditionally at the...

US Geothermal Fizzles

by Debra Fiakas CFA Geothermal power generator US Geothermal (HTM:  NYSE) came up short in reporting financial results for the first quarter ending 2017  -  at least from the perspective of the four analysts with published sales and earnings expectations for the company.  Operating revenue of $8.4 million slipped slightly from the same period a year ago, but produced slightly lower net income of $1.1 million.  The company’s share was $260,000 or a penny per share.  Not good enough say the analyst’s who were collectively looking for two pennies per share in earnings! Missing earnings expectations has...

Ocean Power’s Stock Offering

by Debra Fiakas CFA The first two lines of the prospectus for the April 2017 public stock offering by Ocean Power Technologies (OPTT:  Nasdaq) say all investors need to know about the market opportunity for the company’s wave power generation products.  First, the earth’s surface is covered 70% by water.  Second, over 40% of the world’s population lives within 150 miles of a coastline.  If the earth is dominated by water and a good share of our energy-hungry population lives near that water, doesn’t it make sense to turn the ocean into a renewable energy source? If...

Icahn’s Pig in a Poke

By Brent Erickson, Biotechnology Innovation Organization Members of the U.S. Senate are questioning whether Carl Icahn’s lobbying to change the Renewable Fuel Standard creates an ethics conflict with his role as advisor in the Trump administration. In addition to the ethics question, Members of Congress and some in the biofuels industry should examine whether Icahn could even deliver on the purported quid-pro-quo even if he wanted to. In late February 2017, Icahn and a biofuel trade association reportedly discussed a presidential executive order to make Icahn’s desired change to the RFS Point of Obligation (the so-called POO) in...

Amyris Boards The Sweet Fleet

Jim Lane Back in September 2015, we reported that Amyris inked a multi-year agreement with the US Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, the famed DARPA that gave us everything from kevlar to the Global Positioning System and the Internet the goal in this $35M agreement with the Biological Technologies Office was to create new research and development tools and technologies compressing the time to market for any new molecule by at least 10-fold in both time and cost. The story expanded this week when we heard from Amyris (AMRS) that it had completed strain engineering and...
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