Clean Energy Stocks to Fill the Nuclear Gap
Tom Konrad, CFA If the Japanese use less nuclear power, what will take its place? I'm astounded by the resilience and discipline of the Japanese people in response to the three-pronged earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster, perhaps in large part by my cultural roots in the egocentric United States, where we seem to have forgotten the virtue of self-sacrifice for the greater good. Yet while Japanese society has shown itself to be particularly resilient, the Japanese electric grid is much less resilient. According to International Energy Agency statistics, Japan produced 258 TWh of electricity from...
How Likely Is A Big Rally For Alt Energy Stocks?
Last week, Jefferies & Co. held its Global Clean Technology Conference. Unsurprisingly, the tone wasn't as optimistic as in previous years, with cash and funding worries top of mind. Nearly two months ago, I discussed some tangible signs pointing to looming problems in the industry. However, despite all the gloom, it seems as though several firms (and investors!) are expecting the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) to provide the industry with a lifeline. But will this really be the case? For one thing, the major environmental spending programs in the ARRA are relatively...
Presentation from May 10, 2008 NREL Seminar
For those who attened my presentation yesterday, thank you for all the great questions. I'm having trouble uploading the presentation (it's too large for my server.) However, it should soon appear on NREL's presentation's page. As usual, I own most of the stocks mentioned in the presentation (too many to list,) and the Guiness Atkinson Alternative Energy fund (also mentioned) is an advertiser on AltEnergyStocks.com. UPDATE: It's still not on NREL's page, but I uploaded it on another server here. Although I had to cut it off because of time, if you have...
The Ontario Feed-in Tariff For Alternative Energy
Last month, I wrote about how Ontario, North America's 6th largest jurisdiction by population, had tabled a Green Energy Act to boost the alternative energy industry's growth in the province. In that post, I mentioned that officials would soon release the rules for a feed-in tariff (FIT) system. FITs, which pay fixed rates for renewable power, are all but absent in North America, although they are popular incentive in Europe. Germany's FIT is largely responsible for that country's dominance in solar PV today despite mediocre sun conditions. Ontario released the draft rules and proposed prices for...
Transmission – The Bottleneck We All Saw Coming
by Paula Mints
Transmission and distribution is the process of getting electricity from the point of generation to the point of use. Unfortunately, upgrades, maintenance, and the need to extend the electricity infrastructure from point a to point b are often ignored. Also ignored are infrastructure designs that support a distributed grid with renewable energy sources of electricity.
Transmission bottlenecks are the utterly foreseeable consequence of accelerated solar and
wind deployment. As countries worldwide were announcing RE goals, holding auctions, and providing incentives, system operators everywhere were warning about the need to add new and upgrade existing infrastructure while also warning about...
Chaos Theory, Financial Markets, and Global Weirding
Tom Konrad Ph.D. CFA In my bio, I usually state My study of chaos theory led to my conviction that knowing the limits of our ability to predict is much more important than the predictions themselves, a lesson I apply to both climate science and the financial markets. Despite having written about financial markets and clean energy stocks regularly since 2006, I have never before explained in print what I meant by that. This summer's heat wave and stock market turbulence illustrate how my intuition about chaos theory informs both my understanding of the climate and...
The Rare Earth Supply Chain: Ores, Concentrates, Compounds, Oxides and Metals
REE Refining 101 by Kidela Capital Group “There is a reason why the Rare Earths are called rare. They’re not called rare because they’re truly rare. They’re called rare because it’s very difficult to isolate these elements individually and it takes a lot of skill to do that.” Constantine Karayannopoulos, chief executive of Neo Material Technologies1 Rare Earth Elements have become an indispensable part of modern life, found in everyday items like computers, camera lenses and high efficiency light bulbs to complex, emerging technologies in the optics, medical and defence spheres....
Graphene Stock Investing: What The Pros Think
Tom Konrad CFA Flexible Graphene Sheet image via BigStock Graphene is a crystalline form of carbon in which carbon atoms are arranged in a regular hexagonal pattern. It is very strong, light, and an excellent conductor of heat and electricity. It is also nearly transparent. New laboratory techniques for creating large sheets of graphene, including a roll-to-roll production process, have triggered an explosion of research into new practical applications taking advantage of graphene’s unique properties. Some potential cleantech applications are solar cells, ultracapacitors, water filtration and...
Clean Tech Investing and the Democrats’ Victory
What are the implications of the Democrats' electoral victory for the clean tech industry? That probably won't become clear for a few more months. In the meantime, Red Herring, one of my favorite technology magazines, just published this short piece on the topic: "U.S. election a mixed bag for Cleantech". The early conclusion of industry insiders interviewed for the article is the same as ours - namely that the defeat of Proposition 87 won't be a signficant event in the long-run...and that the future looks overall bright. Happy reading!
Investing For The Anthropocene
by Garvin Jabusch Jack Bogle is flat wrong. I mean, within his worldview and that of Modern Portfolio Theory, he’s right, but in the Anthropocene, he’s wrong. Bogle, founder and retired CEO of the Vanguard Group, is known for championing the superiority of low-fee index funds. His firm’s largest product, the $155 billion Vanguard 500 Index Fund is the perfect poster child for his philosophy. It closely tracks the S&P 500 Index of America’s largest companies, and it has a fee of only 0.06% inclusive. The S&P 500 has performed better than most actively managed portfolios over time, so...
Congress Approves Billions in Energy Storage Incentives
On Friday, the House of Representatives and Senate passed H.R. 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and sent the bill to President Obama for his signature. The impact on companies that manufacture advanced batteries and other energy storage devices will be staggering. The principal energy storage appropriations include: $2,000,000,000 for grants to manufacturers of advanced battery systems and vehicle batteries that are produced in the United States, including advanced lithium ion batteries, hybrid electrical systems, component manufacturers, and software designers; $4,500,000,000 for grants for “Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability” including activities to modernize the electric...
Top Questions to Ask a Venture Capitalist in the First Pitch
David Gold Katherine Connors, Miss Iowa USA 2010 throws the ceremonial first pitch. Source: Cathy T, via Wikimedia Commons You landed your first pitch at a venture capitalist’s (VC) office. You’ve practiced the pitch and have your laptop fired up to deliver. So, like a sprinter at the sound of the gunshot, you dive in hard and heavy to make sure you get through the deck. After all, you might only have one chance to excite them with your company’s story. Inevitably, with all the questions...
Why Alternative Energy Stocks
Are Alternative energy stocks the Microsoft of the future? If you invested $1,000 in MSFT back in 1986 your investment would now be worth over $300,000. If you really believed in the Personal Computing industry you could have also invested in companies like Intel, Apple, and Cisco at bargain basement prices.
Conference Brief – Solar & Storage Finance
Renewable energy finance has many different kinds of participants, as revealed recently at the Solar & Storage Finance conference hosted in NYC. . Listening to the live actors from the financial side of the renewable power industry moved the issues off the page, to a more concrete experience of their specific concerns, including the extent to which their distinct missions were siloed, how they are competitive, and how they synergize.
The presentations were organized to highlight these differences. Several panel discussions were set back-to-back the contrast between lenders vs tax equity investors, both in terms of their goals, but also...
Capital Pacific Bank: Free Market Alternative with a Conscience
Not A Bankster By Jeff Siegel In the long, slow recovery from the 2008 financial collapse, the banking industry has increasingly been regarded as a buglight for the untrustworthy. The Libor (London Interbank Offered Rate) scandal brought banking corruption to the front of the news, and showed the world a huge ethical hole that had burned through the middle of major banks. In a 2012 essay entitled “Is Banking Unusually Corrupt, and If So, Why?” Financial analyst, Circuit Court judge and University of Chicago Law School Lecturer Richard A. Posner laid out the reasons why...
2006 & Alt Energy Investing: 6 Key Points to Remember from a Great Year
It is customary, at the dawn of a new year, to reflect back on the past year’s highlights. This exercise is generally conducted immediately before the new year, so you could say I’m a little late. However, this time around, instead of creating my own list of key things to remember from 2006, I decided to see what the heavy hitters in the alt energy and clean tech spaces had to say. I picked 3 sources that I read religiously and that all published such a list for '06. They are: Clean Break, Cleantech Blog and Red Herring....
