Alternative Energy Stocks

by Clean Energy Intel Companies with significant exposure to the market for natural gas transportation have obviously received a lot of attention recently following the announcement last week of a co-marketing agreement for LNG transportation between oil major Shell (RDS-A) and Westport (WPRT), a provider of natural gas engine technology. This makes the release of Pike's new annual global sales forecasts for natural gas vehicles particularly timely and worth a look. According to Pike Research, there are currently 12.6 million natrual gas vehicles (NGVs) in the world. These are mainly located in Latin America, the Middle East and Africa....

by Clean Energy Intel Late last month, I discussed the fact that in another sign of the undervaluation in the Solar sector, the Board of Renesola (SOL) had authorized a $100m share repurchase program. On the day of the company's announcement, its stock price was down 66% on the year. You can read more detail on the original share repurchase program and the related shareholder rights program here. As a follow-up to the original announcement, Renesola has now released details of the progress that has so far been made in executing the program. The Company itself has purchased 645,424 American Depositary Shares...

by Clean Energy Intel Following the deal between Westport Innovations (WPRT), provider of natural gas engine technology, and Shell (RDS-A) on a co-marketing agreement for natural gas solutions for the trucking industry in North America, Westport CEO David Demers gave an interview on CNBC's Mad Money. You can read more about the original co-marketing deal here. The bottom line is that this commitment from a major oil company will no doubt spur the use of natural gas in the transportation sector. However, it may well represent simply too much competition for the smaller Clean Energy Fuels (CLNE). Again, see more detail here. Following...

by Clean Energy Intel Westport Innovations (WPRT), provider of natural gas engine technology, received a major boost following the announcement of a co-marketing program with Royal Dutch Shell (RDS-A). Understandably, Westport itself rose 19.4% on the day. Perhaps less understandable was the 13.2% rise seen by Clean Energy Fuels (CLNE). The agreement between Westport and Shell launches a co-marketing program in North America aimed at providing an integrated commercial solution for customers in the natural gas vehicle field. You can read a full description of the program in the press statement from Westport here. In essence, the agreement aims "at providing...

by Tor Valenza a.k.a. “Solar Fred” It’s official. With the bankruptcies of Solyndra and Evergreen, two solar panel companies with unique premium solar PV technologies, the Market with a capital M hath spoken: “Solar PV manufacturers, we, the purchasers of solar PV, do hereby care more about price than any fancy innovation. Just give us the best quality panel for the lowest $/watt, thank you very much.” String ribbon doesn’t matter. Cylindrical CIGS film doesn’t matter. Even made in America doesn’t matter unless it's at a competitive price. Apparently, all the Market wants to know are the...

Garvin Jabusch Much has been made this week about the nearly contemporaneous bankruptcy filings of two American solar companies, Silicon Valley’s Solyndra and Evergreen Solar (formerly ESLR) out of Massachusetts. These two had something in common: Both made different types of photovoltaic (PV) panels and both were more expensive than average PV. These two firms did not fail because they manufactured in America, or because solar itself is untenable (on the contrary), but primarily because they were deploying advanced technology that ultimately could not find enough of a market to achieve the scale required to become profitable. It's...

Tom Konrad CFA Stop debating the viability of electric cars, and work on fixing our broken transportation paradigm. My friend and colleague John Petersen has it in for the electric car.  Recently he wrote a summary of his anti-electric car views, entitled "It's Time to Kill the Electric Car, Drive a Stake Through its Heart and Burn the Corpse."  Did I mention he also has a flair for the dramatic?  Many electric vehicle (EV) advocates, or "EVangelists," as he calls them, have tried to refute his arguments.  One of the more coherent...

John Petersen In the most under-reported cleantech story of the year, researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have used an impressive array of computational and modeling tools to prove that the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility, which holds that the first unit of consumption of a good or service yields more utility than the second and subsequent units, doesn't have a loophole for plug-in vehicles. The penultimate slide from an NREL presentation at Plug-in 2011 says it all – and proves beyond doubt that cars with plugs are less effective at saving fuel and reducing emissions than...

guest post by Clean Energy Intel A debate has once again been raised with regard to the future of clean technology and in particular the electric car. Whilst many of the issues on which this debate is based are genuine, they in fact fail to get to the heart of the matter. It therefore seems worthwhile to address some of central issues directly. The Global Problem of Oil’s Monopoly in the Transport Sector At the heart of the matter is the simple fact that a number of threatening global issues cannot be dealt with...

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...

Tom Konrad CFA Almost every stock market sector fell significantly in late July and August this year, and such market declines send me searching for value stocks paying good dividends which I can hold for the long term.  In mid-July, I found some decent values by sifting through the trash, but I was less enthused by the value proposition of conglomerates involved in the clean energy space.  Today I'll take a look at a group of...

John Petersen After eight years of rarely speaking above a whisper, Axion Power International (AXPW.OB) has found its voice, taken the scientific wraps off its PbC® battery technology and shown potential customers, competitors and investors that it's carrying a big stick and is poised to dominate energy storage for stop-start idle elimination – a cheap and sensible fuel efficiency and emissions reduction technology that's expected to grow at spectacular rates for the rest of the decade as shown in the following forecast of battery demand in vehicles equipped with stop-start systems. In a new white...

Tom Konrad CFA Contrary to common belief, the greatest barrier to the adoption of clean energy is not the cost.  In many cases, cost is not a barrier at all: it's an advantage.  That's because energy efficiency measures are usually so cost-effective that they not only pay for themselves, they can often pay for the addition of flashier clean energy technologies such as solar and wind. For institutions in the Federal and MUSH (Municipalities, Universities, Schools, and Hospitals) sectors, the main barriers are lack of capital and expertise.  Lack of capital arises because such institutions traditionally consider...

Tom Konrad CFA The silver lining of all market declines is the chance to buy stock in quality companies at attractive prices.  That opportunity has been notably absent over the last two years, which is why my focus has shifted to smaller and smaller companies in search of reasonable valuations over that time.  Although I still don't believe the market is cheap by any measure other than comparing it to a couple months ago, the volatility is starting to bring some individual bargains, especially on heavy selling days.  For instance, I've started to acquire some of...

John Petersen I was recently invited to prepare a memorandum on the battery industry for the electric mobility working group of the World Energy Council, a global thought leadership forum established in 1923 that includes 93 national committees representing over 3,000 member organizations including governments, businesses and research institutions. Since my memorandum integrated several themes from this blog and tied them all together, I've decided to publish a lightly edited version for readers. To set the stage for the substantive discussion that follows, I’ll start with an 1883 quote from Thomas Edison: “The storage battery is one...

Mark Henwood This sector defines investment risk.   Not only has Evergreen Solar, Inc.   filed for bankruptcy, investors in another high visibility solar developer have been saddled with a 72% loss over the last week.   In a massive shift that has to shake confidence in the company, Germany’s Solar Millennium AG announced on Thursday said it will convert the first 500 megawatts of its 1,000 MW Blythe solar power plant in the Mojave desert to PV. It will decide what technology to use for the second half of the project at a later date.  Nor has it...