Clean Transportation

Tom Konrad, CFA Satellite (GPS) navigation is a Smart Transport strategy that drivers can implement without waiting for governments to act.  This is a look at five GPS Navigation stocks.    I recently wrote how Smart Transport stocks may benefit from declining supply and increasing demand for oil.   I call the application of information technology (IT) to transportation "Smart Transportation."  Smart Transportation improves the function of the market for transportation services, just as the Smart Grid improves the market for electricity: by giving market participants better information and making the price of transportation better reflect...

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....

In the last Technology Quarterly, The Economist had a story about the electric busses in 1907 London.  As they tell it, the electric bus had a real chance to beat out the internal combustion engine, and the company only failed because of fraud.  The electric technology was in many ways superior to the internal combustion engines which eventually won out. In fact, many people at the time still considered the horse to be the far superior technology.  These days, the battle is still between the same three fuels: Electric, Petroleum, and biomass (grass and oats for the...

Johnson Controls (NYSE:JCI) has long been one of my favorite energy efficiency picks, with an added bonus coming from their joint venture with Saft to produce batteries for hybrid and electric vehicles.  They have also shown some energy saving innovation making parts for auto interiors. Building EfficiencyEfficient buildings are much more complex than simply replacing inefficient HVAC and lighting with more efficient versions.  Quite often, the most cost effective measures come from using systems more efficiently.  As an analogy to the home, look at any list of quick tips for energy saving around...

by Clean Energy Intel Nissan Leaf (Left) & Landglider at the 2009 Tokyo Motor Show. Image source: Wikipedia / Tennen-Gas Nissan and its sister company Renault have clearly made a commitment to 'advanced-drive' autos. The facts speak for themselves:     Nissan put the Leaf on the streets in December of 2010 - the first mass-produced, battery electric vehicle. Sales reached 15,000 units worldwide by September of this year.     Nissan-Renault CEO Carlos Ghosn has said he expects sales of BEVs to make up 10% of the sales of new light-duty vehicles by 2020....

I’ve written a fair bit about cars in the last little while, but a couple of important automotive-related news hit the wire again today ahead of the LA Auto Show’s opening on Friday. Firstly, following Ford’s hybrid vehicle announcement, GM’s CEO Rick Wagoner announced today that his company was going ahead with plans to roll out a plug-in hybrid SUV based on its existing Saturn Vue hybrid model. A plug-in version of the Vue would be about 45% more fuel efficient than an equal-sized truck with similar characteristics. Like Ford (NYSE:F), General Motors (NYSE:GM) has been rapidly loosing...

The Casualty Last Monday, I discussed how I had recently reviewed Railpower Tech with a view to potentially adding to my position on grounds that: (a) the company had a fair amount of cash in the bank, which reduced the need to go to capital markets for financing for a while; and (b) that it was getting badly battered by general market conditions, potentially offering an attractive entry point. Although my portfolio has taken a beating in recent weeks, I remain ready to take small positions in stocks if I feel they are being unfairly bashed, including in...

Neal Dikeman For those of you interested in the sector under the sector in electric vehicles, the guts of Li Ion battery technology, the week just got more interesting than an overpriced, over hyped Tesla (TSLA) IPO. Check out a very quiet unnanouncement in A123's SEC filings noting a multi-year supply deal with ConocoPhillips' Cpreme, the emerging leader in anode materials for Li On batteries.  The technology is a processing technology to make high performance graphite based powders out of plain old petroleum coke materials, that has the potential to be very low cost at scale.  A123 has...

Tom Konrad CFA My Ten Electric Vehicle (EV) Stocks article drew considerable attention and comments, including suggestions for stocks that did not make the ten.  Here are my takes on the EV stocks suggested by readers. All of these companies do have something to do with electric vehicles (EVs) or hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), but many were omitted from the original list because EV and HEV exposure was quite small as a fraction of total revenue.  This matters because, even when a small segment of a company is growing rapidly, it can have very little effect on...

Cobasys announced today that they will provide their advanced NiMHax® Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMH) battery systems for GM's 2007 Saturn VUE Green Line SUV which will be made available to consumers in the summer of 2006. Cobasys is a joint venture partnership between Energy Conversion Devices Inc (ENER) and Chevron Technology Ventures LLC, a subsidiary of Chevron Corporation (CVX) ENER gapped up this morning on this news and has been trading nicely for the last couple of months. However, it has run into upside resistance at the 52 week high. The stock is...

As part of a general portfolio cleanup, I recently considered selling my stake in UQM Technologies, Inc. (AMEX:UQM), a manufacturer of electric motors for hybrid and electric vehicles.  I chose to keep the stock because they seem to have sufficient cash on hand to fund several years' operations.  I'm glad I did, because the stock is up 76% since Monday, with no recent news. But there's a rumor that Chrysler will be using a UQM product in one of its planned electric cars.  If that rumor is true, the stock's rise is probably justified.  I like the company either...

Lexus announced today that its dealers have received more than 9,000 pre-sold orders for the 2006 RX 400h luxury gas-electric hybrid SUV through August month-end. The RX 400h provides a powerful new performance dimension to the traditional hybrid advantages of high mileage and low emissions.

Unique Mobility Inc (UQM) is testing a hybrid electric StarTrans Senator Series shuttle bus converted by Transportation Techniques, LLC ("TransTeq") and powered by a UQM® permanent magnet propulsion system and generator. The UQM® propulsion system has been integrated into the driveline on a Ford E450 chassis manufactured by the Tier one automotive supplier to enhance the vehicle's power delivery, performance and fuel efficiency.

Altair Nanomaterials (ALTI) announced that its battery research and development team successfully completed a testing program for lithium ion battery cells containing Altairnano's nano-structured lithium titanate electrode materials. "The test results demonstrated that the performance of these lithium ion battery cells exceed the system-level power requirements set forth by the U.S. Council for Automotive Research FreedomCAR Energy Storage System Performance Goals for hybrid electric vehicle (HEVs), as well as those requirements published by major U.S. automakers," said Evan House, Ph.D., Program Director, Altairnano's Advanced Materials & Power Systems business unit. These batteries demonstrate a useable state-of-charge...

Investors act in irrational, but predictably irrational, ways.    That is the basic tenet of Behavioral Economics.  (Looking for references, I came across an interesting book by that title, by the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.)   For me, these predictable irrationalities provide ways to profit from the mistakes of others in the market, so long as I do not fall into the same (or other) cognitive traps which cause the market opportunities in the first place.  I describe one such technique in this article. Applications to Policy Design In addition to those...

Toyota said it's aiming to increase hybrid production by 60 percent in 2006 and will cut costs and prices to make them more affordable. "In the future, the cars you see from Toyota will be 100 percent hybrid,'' Toyota Executive Vice President Kazuo Okamoto said in Frankfurt, declining to give a time for achieving the target. "We believe that in 10 years the world will be filled with hybrids.''