Tag: ESLRQ

Tom Konrad CFA A new report from GTM research, “PV Technology, Production and Cost Outlook: 2012-2016” predicts continued contraction in PV manufacturing.  While recent price declines have driven record-breaking installations, it has also driven most manufacturers’ margins into the red.  You can’t make up for negative margins on volume. For a stock market investor, the best approach to a cut-throat industry is to stay away until competition and lower prices remove or absorb the excess capacity, and to buy the remaining players just before the industry’s prospects revive. As you can see from the chart above,...

Steve Leone Germany's Q-Cells, a solar industry giant that helped usher in a new era of solar energy, announced Monday that it will file for bankruptcy, but that it will continue to work to restructure. In a statement released by the company, “the Executive Board and the preliminary insolvency administrator will work together to secure the continuity of the company within the insolvency proceedings.” The move follows an unrelated higher court ruling on Friday that Q-Cells says limits its ability to move ahead with a debt restructuring plan. The filing is the most prominent to date in...

Marc Gunther Should we worry about Chinese government subsidies to its solar industry? Or send the Chinese a thank-you note? A group of seven US-based manufacturers of solar panels is alarmed. These manufacturers, led by Solar World (SRWRF.PK), a German firm with a plant in Oregon, filed a complaint with the United States International Trade Commission, which reached a preliminary conclusion in December that US companies were, in fact, being harmed by subsidized imports. If the Commerce Department goes on to find that Chinese firms have been dumping solar panels on the US market at prices below their costs,...

Mark Henwood This sector defines investment risk.   Not only has Evergreen Solar, Inc.   filed for bankruptcy, investors in another high visibility solar developer have been saddled with a 72% loss over the last week.   In a massive shift that has to shake confidence in the company, Germany’s Solar Millennium AG announced on Thursday said it will convert the first 500 megawatts of its 1,000 MW Blythe solar power plant in the Mojave desert to PV. It will decide what technology to use for the second half of the project at a later date.  Nor has it...

Joe McCabe Energy amazes me; the ramifications from elementary school physics of converting potential energy into kinetic energy.  It's happening everywhere around us, and can have far reaching ramifications. An example is the potential energy in the form of pressure built up under Japan in plate tectonics before the recent earthquake, turned into land shaking, country moving, tsunami creating kinetic energy that reaches across the world. There are other forces, lets call it society energy, that can create financial shock waves in the energy industry including political, religious, and inaccurate supply curve assumptions. Energy Industry Domino...

Dana Blankenhorn The lessons of technology investing also apply to solar investing. The decision by Evergreen Solar (ESLR) to move to China has some analysts saying "ha-ha" over solar energy. But in fact it reveals a basic fallacy in the way solar power, and solar power stocks, are analyzed by Wall Street. It's a manufacturing assumption. Solar panels are said to be a manufacturing business. So if prices are going down, that's bad. If governments are no longer seeing solar as just good PR, if they're treating it as a real industry that has to make...

2009 is likely to be a watershed year for the solar photovoltaic (PV) industry, and one which many PV manufacturers will not survive.  Even before the credit crunch and plummeting housing market made capital intensive PV much harder to finance, the easing of supply constraints in the market for solar grade silicon meant that PV supply was liable to increase rapidly, putting pressure on marginal producers.  I expect that the loss of PV demand due to tighter credit markets will more than compensate for the added demand due to the extension of the solar Investment Tax Credit (ITC) and...

Quite a while ago, I promised readers that  I'd write an article looking into Lithium Technology Corporation (LTHU.PK,) in addition to articles I've already written on US Geothermal (HTM) and Evergreen Solar (ESLR)  Lithium Tech is a provider of custom lithium rechargeable batteries for military, national security, stationary power, and transportation applications.  Investors hoping for the big score probably have their eyes on the transportation applications, which should drive demand for lithium-ion batteries over the next decade.  That's all wonderful, but since August, we've had a financial meltdown, prompting me to focus much more on companies' need to raise...

Evergreen Solar has been in a trading range ($8 to $18) for about two years.  Now it's trading again at the bottom of the range, and with the general market downturn, along with the anticipated wave of new polysilicon supply a lot of investors will be wondering: Is Evergreen about to turn around as it has so many times in the past, or is it going down from here? Over the past couple years, I have been very successful at trading the stock, but not because of some special insight.  When a stock has so many analysts following it...