The Week in Cleantech

Jeff Siegel and Tom Konrad CFA May 14: New Flyer (TSX:NFI, OTC:NFYEF) Sees Bus Market Revival North America's largest supplier of heavy-duty transit buses sees overall demand at an "all-time high." More here. May 15: Electric Car Battery Company Struggles JS: A123 Systems (NASDAQ:AONE) has announced Q1, 2012 results. . . Revenue fell 40% from $18.1 million in Q1, 2011 to $10.9 million. Net loss came in at $90.8 million, compared to a net loss of $53.6 million last year, and as of March 31, the company has $113.1 million in...

Tom Konrad CFA May 7: Auction of Uni-Solar Fails to Draw a Qualified Bid As if there weren't enough bad signs for the solar industry these days, Energy Conversion Devices (OTC:ENERQ.PK) is cancelling the auction for United Solar Ovonic LLC (A.k.a. Uni-solar) as a going concern because of the failure to receive a qualified bid in the court-approved bankruptcy proceeding.  The companies have retained an auction services firm to prepare for the sale of Uni-solar's assets. May 8: Earnings Misses Hide Strong Revenue Trends at Ameresco (AMRC) and Pike Electric (PIKE) Ameresco (AMRC) and Pike Electric...

Jeff Siegel and Tom Konrad April 30: Orion Energy Systems (OESX) Triples Stock Buyback TK: Sometimes microcap stocks fall just because no one is paying attention.  The directors of Orion Energy Systems (AMEX:OESX) clearly think their company is one such. Orion is an energy management company with a focus on high efficiency lighting systems and alternative energy system integration in commercial buildings.  The company is profitable, with a trailing Price/Earnings ratio of 18, a Price/Sales ratio of 0.5, and sold at less than half of book value ($4.05) when the market closed on Friday...

Jeff Siegel and Tom Konrad April 23: Solar Grade Silicon Industry Under Pressure TK: Ed Gunther reports that the RSi (Renewable Silicon International) Easton facility has been shuttered.  Closure is attributed to pricing pressure in the solar silicon industry. April 24: Will PowerSecure (NASDAQ:POWR) Bounce Today? JS: PowerSecure International (NASDAQ:POWR) announced today that it landed $10 million worth of new orders for its smart grid power systems and LED area lights. Some of these deals are actually repeat orders, which certainly offers some confidence for the company's products....

Jeff Siegel and Tom Konrad April 16: Canadian Solar (NASDAQ:CSIQ) Soars in Pre-Market JS: Capstone Turbine (NASDAQ:CPST) announced this morning that it landed a deal with a Michigan hospital to supply a dual-mode C1000 Power Package. The unit will provide both prime and backup power to save energy and increase reliability at the facility. Not sure how much this will do for the stock today, but I still maintain that Capstone Turbine below $1.00 is a gift. Particularly for those who can exercise a little patience. Consolidation looks to continue in the...

Capstone(CPST), Siemens (SI) and China BAK(CBAK) announce deals; Brightsource withdraws IPO. Jeff Siegel and Tom Konrad April 9: Capstone Turbine (NASDAQ:CPST) Lands Another 10 Megawatts JS: Capstone Turbine (NASDAQ:CPST) announced this morning that it received about 10 megawatts worth of new orders from two oil and gas producers in the Eagle Ford shale play. For the past few years we've seen Capstone become one of the many beneficiaries of the oil & gas boom in the U.S. I expect to see Capstone continue to benefit from this space. That's the good news....

Easter Treats for Energy Focus, Solazyme, Capstone, Alstom, and Iberdrola; SemiLEDS Lays an Egg

Jeff Siegel March 26: Tesla Motors (NASDAQ:TSLA) Upgraded to $49 A123 Systems (NASDAQ:AONE) announced today that it will have to replace battery modules and packs that may contain defective cells. The replacement is likely to cost about $55 million. The stock is down about 4 percent in pre-market. If the broader market stays positive today, the damage could be contained. I expect to see a number of follow-up articles blasting A123 because, well, the company works in the electric vehicle space and it's received government support. The combination of the two makes it a popular target....

Jeff Siegel March 20: Another Solar Stock Disappoints IBC Advanced Alloys Corp. (TSX-V:IB) (PINK SHEETS:IAALF), a beryllium alloy producer that's doing some ground-breaking work in the world of nuclear fuels, announced this morning that its advanced castings are being supplied for the European Space Agency's Automated Transfer Vehicle, which is expected to dock with the International Space Station in a little over a week. For the sake of clarification, IBC serves a variety of industries, including automotive, telecommunications and a number of industrial applications. But I actually started following this one after discovering the...

Jeff Siegel March 13: Do Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) Shorts Get Burned? LED-maker Energy Focus, Inc. (OTCBB:EFOI) announced this morning that it entered into a 5-year cooperation agreement with Communal International, Inc. Under the terms of the deal, Communal will introduce Energy Focus to new potential customers in Asia and assist in reducing manufacturing cost. This is a stock we played a few years ago for massive gains after the company landed a number of deals with the U.S. Military. Not sure how today's news will impact the stock, but it could be good for a quick pop....

Last year, I used a special run of AltEnergyStocks.com's new Cleantech News (CTN) aggregator to bring you the ten stories of 2007 which bloggers found most interesting or controversial. Continuing the tradition, below are the ten stories of 2008 which Cleantech and Green Bloggers were talking about. One of my favorite features of CTN is how it not only provides links to the original articles, but also links to the articles referencing it. Hence the list below includes links to the entire conversation. Unsustainable Biofuels In January, The Gaurdian kicked things off with an article saying...

In General Industry News, The Wall Street Journal's Environmental Capital told us about the Green Meltdown. There is no doubt that alternative energy stocks have a rough ride ahead of them. On the one hand, revenue-less companies whose business model is heavily leveraged to technological innovation may not be able to access sufficient funding to go on for an extensive period of time. On the other hand, business models that rely on cheap credit and large amounts of debt, like large wind and solar parks, will get squeezed by credit tightness. In Environmental Markets, McKinsey discussed...

In Solar, John Gilluly at The Chip Stock Trader let us know that help was on the way for solar stocks. An interesting take on the solar installation business with a stock pick - Akeena Solar (AKNS). But Keith Johnson at the WSJ's Environmental Capital suggested everyone should put away the champagne: the much awaited bill extending tax credits for solar and wind, it seems, may not be passed this session. Failure to agree on a bailout plan over the weekend would just about fully re-load the gun for solar shorts to get back to work next...

In Solar, Eric Savitz at Barron's Tech Trader Daily wondered whether stock loan deals would be repaid. It's always important for shareholders to pay attention to which financing structures companies chose. In this case, if you understood this well, it could have a been good lateral short play on Lehman's problems. However, if you were long ESLR and had not paid this financing too much attention, you were probably not pleasantly surprised. Good CleanTech let us know about a new report claiming that thin-film will make up a whooping 40% of the solar PV market by 2012....

In Geothermal, Richard T. Stuebi at Cleantech Blog told us about geothermal heat pumps, the forgotten one. Matthew McDermott at TreeHugger informed us that Ormat had bought exploration rights on an Alaskan volcano. In Solar, Eric Savitz at Barron's gave us more details of Cypress Semiconductor's spin-off of its SunPower unit. He also provided growing evidence of an impending shake-out in the solar PV sector driven by panel oversupply. Jeff St. John at Greentech Media told us that LG was plotting a partnership with Conergy. He also discusses plans by large South Korean firms,...

In Solar, New Energy Finance told us that Spain had raised the cap on new solar capacity, but not enough to appease critics. Ucilia Wang at Greentech Media brought us analysts' picks for 2009's winning Solar stocks, but they didn't mention Sharp (SHCAY.PK), which GoodCleanTech told us had developed a technique to halve silicon wafer costs. In Clean Transportation, Autoblog Green brought us Insight into Honda's new Global Hybrid.  And Autoboog Green also told us GM's Lutz was bragging about the Volt's "flawless" batteries, GoodCleanTech introduced Mazda's plans for a rival. Treehugger...