Alternative Energy Stocks

Last week, I mentioned that I had attended a conference focused on opportunities in the biomass and bioenergy sectors. One of the article ideas I got from this conference was on the emerging market for wood pellets (tightly packed sawdust and other wood shavings) for heat and electricity. How interesting that, over the weekend, the magazine Science published an article suggesting that the US should ramp up its use of wood for small-scale heat and electricity production (the article is not available free of charge but you can find a summary here). The Wood (Pellet) Advantage It...

When I was researching my Comparison of Clean Energy Mutual Funds and Clean Energy Tracking Portfolio articles, I came across something strange: the American Trust Energy Alternatives Fund (ATEAX) did not seem to have a listing on American Trust's website.  However, finance sites were still publishing price and holdings data, and there was no recent news, so I didn't think much of it, since other funds seemed superior based on both costs and fund holdings. Last week, I noticed that the fund's price had not changed since the end of February, so I did a little digging.  Here is...

Last month, I wrote about how Ontario, North America's 6th largest jurisdiction by population, had tabled a Green Energy Act to boost the alternative energy industry's growth in the province. In that post, I mentioned that officials would soon release the rules for a feed-in tariff (FIT) system. FITs, which pay fixed rates for renewable power, are all but absent in North America, although they are popular incentive in Europe. Germany's FIT is largely responsible for that country's dominance in solar PV today despite mediocre sun conditions.  Ontario released the draft rules and proposed prices for...

Last week, several branches of the Colorado state government organized a symposium on "How Colorado Electric/Gas Utilities and Their Customers Can Benefit from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)."  I attended, with an ear to how the likely implementation would affect Clean Energy Stocks. Overall, Colorado seems to be taking a very organized approach to a monumental task.  According to Colorado Public Utilities Commission (PUC) Chairman Ron Binz, who officiated at the conference, they intend to organize proposals into an overall thematic plan for spending stimulus money.  In addition, they are working to eliminate barriers to regulated utilities...

I woke up this morning with a dreadful case of writer’s block and feared that I might have to take a week or two off while awaiting the end of the current SEC reporting cycle. Mercifully, one of my readers sent an e-mail message that asked some pointed questions about lead-carbon battery technologies and the relative strengths and weaknesses of the principal lead-carbon battery developers. So instead of dashing off a quick reply, I thought it might be interesting to share both the message and a detailed response. Besides, it seems like a great way to kill two...

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...

I was a subscriber to Doug Casey's International Speculator from 2004 to 2006, and I consider his research into the junior mining sector the best I've come across, although his libertarian political views are usually at odds with my own.   Last month, Casey Research invited AltEnergyStocks.com to join their affiliate program, meaning that we would earn referral fees if our readers subscribed to their newsletters using the links on our site.  Like most people, I like getting paid, but my integrity is also important to me, so I wasn't comfortable writing an article simply hyping their products.  Instead, I...

It is fair to say that most people continue to equate the terms "alternative" and "energy" with expensive, unreliable and plain unpractical. This naturally leads a majority of people to view alternative energy investing as a high-risk play on some unproven technology with an uncertain probability of success. This is a perception we've tried to dispel on several occasions, whether we were talking about blue chip alt energy stocks, dividend alt energy stocks or utility alt energy stocks. It's also fair to say that most people don't typically associate value investing and, by extension, ...

In connection with this week’s launch of their new “What Matters” website McKinsey & Company published a pair of essays that should be of particular interest to alternative energy investors. The first essay, “Electron-Democracy,” describes the coming smart grid as a system that will be built outward from a core of centralized power plants, but increasingly be supported and stabilized by incremental energy flows between small producers and consumers that can respond nimbly to market demand with lower capital costs and more robust protection against disruption. Putting the pieces together, the authors suggest that: “. . ....

Yesterday, I outlined a strategy to approximately replicate the performance of a Clean Energy mutual fund at much lower cost, with only a couple hours of effort.  I gave a cost example based on $5000 invested in 5 stocks, with another $1000 worth of a single stock added in each subsequent year.   This is the procedure I would use to select the initial five stocks. Collect all the top five or ten holdings of the available Clean Energy mutual funds.  This data is available from Morningstar, and on fund sponsor's home pages. A few of these holdings may...

Tom Konrad, Ph.D. The intense and growing investor interest in Clean Energy Investing can be seen in the recent growth of new clean energy mutual fund and Exchange traded fund issues.  Although competition for investors' money is heating up, and I've noticed a slow decline in fund fees, those fees are still quite high, with expense ratios ranging from 1% to 2.75% for Clean Energy mutual funds and 0.5% to 0.85% for Clean Energy ETFs. For many investors, that leaves a lot of room for cost savings by investing in individual stocks.  Nearly all the benefits of diversification...

And I'm not talking about gold, but I liked the play on this title. Last December, I wrote about a report that claimed that solar stocks were the best play on the cleantech revolution. In that article, I analyzed the two solar ETFs: the Claymore/Mac Global Solar Index ETF (TAN) and the Market Vectors/Van Eck Global Solar Energy ETF (KWT). At the end of the article, I said I had an open buy order on TAN. That buy order expired unfilled in January as the suckers rally progressed, but TAN then dropped to the...

A couple of weeks ago, we received an inquiry from a reader asking us to look into potential beneficiaries of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)'s high-speed rail (HSR) provisions. This sounded like something our readers would want to read about so I decided to do it. In a nutshell, here are the two main component's of ARRA's HSR approach: $8 billion for for HSR corridors and other intercity passenger rail service (unclear at this point how much will go into each, although the companies discussed below can benefit from both) The rules around state issuance...

It’s official! Cleantech, the sixth industrial revolution, has arrived on time and in the midst of extraordinary crisis. Like every good revolution, blood is flowing in the streets; the guillotine is en route to Wall Street and the mob is so busy plotting retribution for the excesses of the past that most have no time to consider the future. But as yesterday’s dynasties decay, crumble and fall, a new generation of visionaries is already building on the wreckage of the past. These are indeed troubled times that bear an eerie resemblance to the opening sentence from A Tale of...

Portec Rail Products (PRPX) released  fourth quarter results on Thursday, comfortably beating analyst expectations.  The stock promptly dropped 18% to just below $5, continuing a two-week decline from around $7.50. I'm baffled.  Although the rail freight industry is a victim of falling oil prices (which means they lose market share to trucking) and the overall drop-off of the transportation industry, this is not news. Portec has several things going for it.  The company has a strong balance sheet, with current assets exceeding total liabilities, and strong cash flow from operations.  Total revenue is down slightly from last...

Dedicated legislations have been at the core of some of the most impressive regional growth stories in alternative energy, most notably in Germany with the Renewable Energy Sources Act or in California with the various legislative solar initiatives. On Monday, the Canadian province of Ontario became the latest jurisdiction to join the fray as lawmakers introduced the Green Energy and Green Economy Act. Why should investors care? Because such legislations have been at the core of some of the most impressive regional growth stories in alternative energy.  As a bit of a backgrounder on Ontario, there...