Clean Transportation

John Petersen During the fourteen years that I've lived in Switzerland, the Germans have been the world's staunchest supporters of green power and alternative energy. Their aggressive development of wind power was breathtaking, as was their warm embrace of photovoltaic power. Over the last few weeks, however, there has been an ominous change in the mainstream German media's tone as the political class finally comes to grips with the unpleasant reality that rooftop solar panels are worthless on short, grey winter days and "For weeks now, the 1.1 million solar power systems in Germany have generated almost no...

Enova Systems Inc (ENVA)announced today that it has entered into a development and sales agreement with China's First Auto Works (FAW) for parallel hybrid drive systems for their hybrid buses. FAW signed a two-phase development agreement with Enova for hybrid-electric motors and power controllers for its newest hybrid buses. Enova is working with both FAW and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) of Texas to integrate and validate the new Enova parallel hybrid drive system for these buses.

John Petersen On March 30th, Lux Research released an update on the vehicle electrification market titled "Small Batteries, Big Sales: The Unlikely Winners in the Electric Vehicle Market" that predicts: E-bikes and micro-hybrids carry minimal storage, but compensate with high volume. E-bikes show strong unit sales, as they sustain a 157 GWh storage market totaling $24.3 billion in revenues in 2016. Micro-hybrids benefit from increasingly stringent emissions limits, supporting 41 GWh and $3.1 billion in storage sales. Hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) like Toyota's Prius grow steadily while PHEVs and EVs are at the mercy of external factors....

By Harris Roen Summer is here, and the sun has been shining on alternative energy. Two investment themes in the changing alternative energy landscape have emerged as potential profit centers for investors. To take advantage of these trends, the Roen Financial Report has added in four new companies to the list of about 250 alternative energy companies that we track for our readers. Investment Theme #1: The growing domestic Japanese solar market In the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Japan has committed to growing renewables as a domestic energy source. According to Mercom Capital Group,...

Quantum Fuel Systems Technologies Worldwide Inc (QTWW) will provide the engineering effort to accommodate the model year changes for the fuel system. Quantum will also produce the alternative fuel systems and provide the specialty vehicle assembly of the fuel systems into the new trucks. In addition to integrating roughly 250 components into the vehicle, Quantum was also responsible for the powertrain and systems engineering to ensure that the system is optimized for performance, durability, safety and emission compliance over the life of the vehicle. Quantum's engineering effort extends to the vehicles being validated through a wide range of operating...

Toyota Motor Corp. (TM) will start building its Prius hybrid sedans in China next year with FAW Group in a step it hopes will promote the vehicles as the global standard for fuel-efficient cars. The move could also help China as it looks for alternative energy sources and tries to keep pollution in check while demand for cars continues to surge.

John Petersen On March 4, 2011 the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory published a comprehensive review of "Electrochemical Energy Storage Technologies for Green Grid" that is a must-read for serious investors who want to understand the technical and economic intricacies of the energy storage sector. It explains why storage is a key enabling technology for wind and solar power, the smart grid, efficient transportation and a legion of high-technology manufacturing and service enterprises that can't survive without reliable power. It also explains why energy storage is an investment mega-trend that will endure for decades. While I normally try to...

Tom Konrad CFA There are two types of solution to the liquid fuels scarcity caused by stagnating (and eventually falling) oil supplies combined with growing demand in emerging economies.  The most obvious is to find a substitute to replace oil.  These substitute have barriers to their use as a replacment petroleum based fuel.  Understanding those barriers also leads us to the investment opportunities that arise from these substitutes.  As I wrote the first five parts of this series, looking into potential substitutes for gasoline and diesel, it was clear that many potential substitutes would need...

Tom Konrad, Ph.D., CFA Seaspan Worldwide has several classes of publicly traded securities, with different claims on its income streams. The company owns container ships leased under long term contracts to shipping companies.  The shipping industry is in a massive downturn, raising concerns about its customers' ability to pay. The company's preferred shares have sold off more than half as far as its common stock- far more than justified by its relatively low risk. There exists a 5.5% yield opportunity to buy the preferred and hedge the risk by buying puts on the...

John Petersen Last week the American Chemical Society published a white paper in Environmental Science & Technology from a team of researchers at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and the Argonne National Laboratory Center for Transportation Research titled "Environmental Implication of Electric Vehicles in China." This white paper concludes that: Implementing electric vehicles in China will increase national CO2, SO2 and NOX emissions; and Gasoline HEVs are more environmentally friendly, more commercially mature, and less cost-intensive. The following graph comes from page 4 of the white paper and compares the relative fleet wide CO2 emissions for gasoline ICEs,...

There are at least 22 Electric car startups (not counting aspiring makers of electric bikes, electric motorcycles, and stranger contraptions) today, each competing to break in as a new manufacturer. I expect that some of them will succeed, and that the traditional car manufacturer who are currently pursuing the PHEV will be relctant to forsake their highly refined ICE technology. Existing carmakers could thus fail to head off outside competition, leaving a niche open for EV-only manufacturers. I'm not trying to say that the internal combustion engine is dead, long live the electric motor (although I wish I were), but I do expect that a growing proportion of the vehicle fleet will be all electric, even as Plug-In Hybrids are gaining ground.

The Motley Fool finally had something good to say about an alternative energy stock. It just so happens to be for one I purchased earlier this morning. Don't look now, but Energy Conversion Devices might just prove to be that rare bird an alternative energy play with actual products and a reasonable chance of living up to lofty investor expectations. ... It would appear to me that hybrid vehicle batteries are the biggest near-term opportunity. Although the company didn't specify the customers, it has acknowledged receiving production orders for battery packs. They say that...

By Jeff Siegel Well, I was partly right.. Last year I wrote the following about the car sharing company Zipcar (NASDAQ: ZIP): “... because Hertz and Enterprise are foaming at the mouth to tap the car sharing market, I wouldn't be surprised if one or both eventually made a bid for ZIP in a couple of years. Either way, I don't think Zipcar is under any serious threat in the near-term, and I may be looking to pick some up on dips.” When I got to the office on Wednesday morning, I read the following headline:...

John Petersen On January 28th the DOE announced the closing of a $1.4 billion ATVM loan to Nissan North America, a unit of Nissan Motors (NSANY), for the purpose of retooling a factory in Smyrna, Tennessee to produce the Leaf, a zero emission electric car that will be released later this year. Nissan will use the loan proceeds to create "up to 1,300 American jobs" at a cost of about $1.3 million each and the 200,000 Leafs it hopes to produce and sell each year will "conserve up to 65.4 million gallons" of gas, a whopping 327 gallons...

John Petersen In 2009, the world produced some 13.2 billion metric tons of hydrocarbons, or about 4,200 pounds for every man, woman and child on the planet. Burning those hydrocarbons poured roughly 31.3 billion metric tons of CO2 into our atmosphere. The basic premise of alternative energy is that widespread deployments of wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles will slash hydrocarbon consumption, reduce CO2 emissions and give us a cleaner, greener and healthier planet. That premise, however, is fatally flawed because our planet cannot produce enough non-ferrous industrial metals to make a meaningful difference and the prices...

Taking a study break, I happened to see an article in the Denver Post bringing together two of my favorite clean energy themes: Efficient transport, and wind power. Rail transport has become essential to delivering windpower across the country. The full article is here: Rolling With the Wind.