The Week in Cleantech

On Monday, the Boston Globe told us about a new report that sheds some doubt on contentions that cleantech is the new darling of venture capitalists. Thanks to the WSJ's Energy Roundup for this one. Red Herring also published an article on this report last week. On Monday, Eli Hoffman at Seeking Alpha told us about Barron's latest five cleantech stock picks. Of those, I am particularly familiar with SunPower (NASDAQ:SPWR) and Fuel Tech (NASDAQ:FTEK). Both are a bit rich at the moment but I like Fuel Tech's exposure to China, especially at a time when the country...

On Monday, Joe Carroll and Mario Parker at Bloomberg News argued that the current ethanol bust was making losers of Bush, Gates and D.E. Shaw. We are proud to say that at AltEnergyStocks.com, we have always been corn ethanol bears, even when many of these stocks were trending up. But beyond bragging about our foresight, which, by the way, was shared by several people, the current fiasco is a cautionary tale of the dangers of government trying to create a winner industry when that industry makes no sense on most levels. Things may change, but to date all that...

On Tuesday, Andrea Quong at Red Herring told us that investors reaped returns on clean energy. A quick look at returns in the European cleantech VC and PE spaces. On Wednesday, Emily Gertz at World Changing gave us the run-down on the legal climate on climate change. This action by NY's Attorney General formalizes what many have been saying for a while - certain power gen companies, and the investors that own them, could be exposed to serious regulatory risks related to global warming in the years ahead. Strangely, those companies and their investors often seem to favor...

On Monday, Cassandra Vinograd at the WSJ's Energy Roundup told us about Merrill Lynch's new Energy Efficiency Index. You can read more about the index here. As our regular readers know, we are big believers in energy efficiency as an investment thesis, and think significant opportunities will materialize in this space in the coming years. On Tuesday, Todd Woody at Business 2.0 wondered whether a small Norwegian company was about to reverse 100 years of automotive history. Could we be looking at the next wonder-boy of the clean automotive movement? On Wednesday, Dan Lewis at AEI shared...

Many of our readers may know about this already, but earlier this week I came across The Energy Challenge, a series of articles by New York Times writers on energy and environment issues. This is a great resource for alt energy investors and aficionados. On Monday, David Biello at Scientific American discussed the state of the science for us. This is likely nothing new for many of our readers but serves as a good reminder of why I believe the cleantech space will be so strong in the next few decades. On Wednesday, Rebecca Smith and Kevin...

On Tuesday, Dallas Kachan at Inside Greentech gave us the scoop on a recent GE move (NYSE:GE) to gain greater access to the European wind market. Interesting how GE is leveraging its capacity in the finance realm to complement its Ecomagination efforts. On Tuesday, Chris Coad at Seeking Alpha wondered whether high gas prices where increasing demand for hybrids. The reverse begs asking: would a collapse in gas prices lead to a material drop in demand for hybrid cars? On Wednesday, Dan Lewis at AEI directed us to an interesting article on vanadium redox-flow batteries (VRBs) (PDF...