Misc

By Jeff Siegel The million-dollar manicured lawns of Montecito, CA have withered, died, and gone to seed. The polo fields are little more than dust now, and many have traded the good china for paper plates so as to avoid using the dishwasher. There’s no doubt about it  Mother Nature doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor, black or white, fat or skinny. When she lays the smack down, we all feel it. And there is no better example of this than the debilitating drought that’s wringing the Golden State dry. Of course, for those who can afford...

50 Shades of Green Garvin Jabusch As I've written before, "human economies are still so far from real sustainability that even a highly idealized portfolio of our most sustainable enterprises necessarily falls short. Ultimately, the best any portfolio can do is mirror the reality of the world, and today, still, even the best representatives of sustainability can be found wanting compared to what will be required if we would like to keep society thriving indefinitely." There's no better example of the various conundrums swirling around sustainable economics than GMOs. As one institutional client, Timothy Yee of...

by Debra Fiakas CFA The citizens of a San Luis, Arizona are about to get a new, very tall neighbor.  Solar Wind Energy, Inc. (SWET:  OTCQB; formerly Clean Wind Energy Tower) recently secured 600 acres in the area to build a solar wind tower.  This is a unique design that takes advantage of air heated by the sun’s power utilizes.  Fast cooling of the air creates a powerful downdraft that drives turbines at the chimney base.  Solar Wind expects the generators attached to its turbines to produce up to 1,250 megawatts of electricity that can be...

Marc Gunther How’s GE’s ecomagination  going? I put that question today to Mark Vachon, who is vice president for ecomagination at General Electric (GE). He replied by talking about natural gas. “The large macro trend of gas is massive,” he said. “Our oil and gas business will be a huge beneficiary.” An abundance of shale gas in the U.S., and methane gas reserves in Australia present a wealth of opportunities for GE, which plays all along the supply chain for natural gas. “We’re a massive player in gas exploration,” Mark said. “We have a water business that can deal...

Dr. K. Global warming worriers like Al Gore are missing the many wonderful things that global warming will bring to the world, not to mention the many opportunities to profit from this so-called "climate catastrophe."  Global warming isn't about hot weather, it's about hot stocks in your portfolio.  A new report tells you the stocks to buy now! Global Warming is the greatest opportunity for investors in a generation.  Some stocks may fall, but others will be headed upward like a the famous hockey-stick chart from the 2001 IPCC report.  For just $499.95, you can buy my...

Saj Karsan EnviroStar (EVI) is a distributor of laundry equipment that has developed a proprietary dry-wet-cleaning machine that avoids the use of perchloroethylene (Perc), a harmful chemical that the International Agency for Research on Cancer has deemed a carcinogen. Perc is also classified as a hazardous air contaminant by the US Environment Protection Agency, and its use will become illegal in the state of California in the year 2023. EnviroStar's patented Green-Jet process uses an environmentally-friendly, water-based solution that is both non-toxic and requires less energy consumption than traditional dry-cleaning methods. This is currently a tiny company, with...

Charles Morand Last Thursday, I reviewed two chapters from the recently published book "Investment Opportunities for a Low Carbon World"*. This post reviews two more.  Geothermal Energy Alexander Richter, Glitnir Bank (now Íslandsbanki) Geothermal is one of the most interesting forms of clean power generation there is. As noted by the author, the most convincing argument for geothermal electricity is the fact that it operates at capacity factors in the upper 90s. This makes it the only renewable technology suitable for baseload power with the exception of dam-based (i.e. large-scale) hydro. However, as...

Charles Morand Tom and I recently received complimentary copies of a new book called "Investment Opportunities for a Low Carbon World", edited FTSE Group's Director of Responsible Investment Will Oulton*.  The book is a compendium of articles by 31 different authors broken down into three main categories: (1) environmental and low-carbon technologies; (2) investment approaches, products and markets; and (3) regulation, incentives, investor and company case studies. While Tom will provide a comprehensive review of the book once he's finished reading it in its entirety, I will instead review a few selected chapters over...

Vacation and Meet Me at the Colorado Renewable Energy Conference or the International Peak Oil Conference. Tom Konrad, Ph.D., CFA I'm on vacation this week, so I'm going to leave you with a preview from a presentation I will be giving at the Colorado Renewable Energy Conference on Aug 29 in Golden Colorado. I'm updating my Investing in Renewable Energy presentations, and I've been able to incorporate a lot of the work Charles and I did on clean energy mutual funds and ETFs since January this year. ETF Holdings Revealed Charles did some in-depth work...

Dear Readers, You can now keep up with AltEnergyStocks.com on Twitter by visiting our Twitter page. We will post updates when we blog as well as other useful info about what we're up to and relevant news stories. Be sure to check us out! All the best, The AltEnergyStocks.com Team

I just got back from Growing the Margins, a conference and trade show focused on the bio-mass/gas/energy/products sectors with a focus on the farm and food industries. These are not sectors I have traditionally paid a great deal of attention to, despite the fact that there are very interesting things happening in both. The most notable contribution to alt energy from farm industry over the past five years has been corn ethanol, an enterprise I have long believed to be economically and environmentally unsustainable. To be sure, ethanol, but especially second-generation ethanol, got a fair...

John Kenneth Galbraith, renowned economist and author of the bestselling The Great Crash, 1929, died in 2006, and so he never saw the crash of 2008.  But he would not have been surprised.   I just finished reading his A Short History of Financial Euphoria: Financial Genius is Before the Fall, a treatise on bubbles and busts of history, starting with the Dutch Tulip Bubble of 1637 and ending with the crash of 1987. The book was written in 1989, but the message is still timely today.  Galbraith draws out the common factors of all financial...

The team at AltEnergyStocks.com wishes all of our readers a happy and safe holiday season 2008. In 2007, we brought you the Cleantech News service. In 2008, we were delighted to bring you individual and category stock pages. We intend to continue looking for ways to create value for our readers in 2009. As always, we invite you to submit comments and suggestions on how you think we can improve AltEnergyStocks.com. We also always love to hear from you through your comments on the site - keep them coming! You all helped make 2008 a great...

With about a month to go to the 2008 presidential election campaign, and after two presidential and one vice-presidential debates, we have heard enough from both tickets on the issue of energy to make up our mind on an official endorsement, an issue we do not take lightly. John McCain's and Barack Obama's stances on energy can seem very similar to the casual observer. Both candidates support a cap on carbon emissions, and both tend to argue for "All of the Above" when asked about specific forms of energy. But there are key differences: 1....

I just finished the third (of three) Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) exams.  I believe I passed, (results will not be available until September.)  I've taken more than my share of tests in my life, and these three exams have been the three hardest.  I decided to publish my advice for others becoming CFA Candidates because 1) my partner at Alternative Energy Stocks, Charles Morand has just become a CFA Candidate (he'll take the first exam in December), and 2) there is little advice available online. VI. Buy two of your chosen model of calculator  The reason for this is...

A quick note to wish AltEnergyStocks.com Analyst Tom Konrad the best of luck with his CFA Level III exam today. We also want to wish good luck to all of our readers who are also taking one of the CFA exams today, break a leg! We will be taking a break from The Week In Cleantech this week and will be back on Monday with a special feature.