Alternative Energy Stocks

James Montgomery First Solar (FSLR) has added another mega-scale project to its pipeline, helping ensure there's enough to feed its thin-film solar PV manufacturing machine. Rock formations in Clark County, NV. Photo by John Fowler The 250-MW Moapa project being developed by K Road in Clark County, Nevada, about 30 miles north of Las Vegas, was given a green light last summer, making it the first major U.S. solar project approved on tribal land. Construction has been pushed back roughly a year from the original timeline, with First Solar now saying...

Tom Konrad CFA Graphene is going to transform clean tech in less than five years. That, at least, is the opinion of the majority of the respondents to my reader poll about how graphene is likely to affect clean tech stocks.  This is in marked contrast to the caution expressed by the the responses from my panel of professional money managers who invest in clean tech stocks. (Their responses are the subject of a previous article on graphene investing.) I think Shawn Kravetz, President of Esplanade Capital,  LLC, and manager of solar-focused hedge...

By Harris Roen Alternative energy MFs racked up extremely robust gains in the past year. Returns range from a low of 16%, to a high of 64% for a mutual fund that is heavy into solar investments. ETFs also did well, but returns are much more variable. They range from a loss of 34% for a carbon ETF, to more than doubling of a solar ETF. Mutual Funds Returns remain excellent for alternative energy MFs overall, with average mutual fund up 32.3% for the year. Not a single fund posted a loss in...

Doug Young Asset seizure casts new clouds over Suntech retrench Someone should write a book about solar panel superstar Suntech (NYSE: STP), whose the incredible rise and spectacular fall has taken yet another intriguing twist with word that some of its major assets have been seized by a court in Italy. The Italian angle is just the latest turn in this international story of a company founded by an Australian-educated Chinese engineer, which once look set to revolutionize the solar energy sector, only to be forced into bankruptcy when...

Tom Konrad CFA On September 17th, the Chinese Ministry of Finance announced the long anticipated renewal of China’s New Energy Vehicle (i.e. electric vehicle or EV) subsidies.  The new subsidies for cars were in-line with market expectations, but will be reduced to 10% below the current levels next year, and 20% below the current levels in 2015.  Subsidies for buses fell short of expectations. Conventional gasoline-electric hybrid models were not included in the subsidies, but some plug-in hybrid (PHEV) were.  The subsidies amount to 60,000 ($9,802) yuan for pure electric autos with a range over 250 km (155 miles),...

by Chris Edgette, Senior Director, California Energy Storage Alliance and Charlie Barnhart, Postdoctoral Scholar, Global Climate and Energy Project, Stanford University Is storage cost effective?  Misinterpretations of a Stanford study on the energetic performance of energy storage recently published in Energy and Environmental Science appear to have added to the confusion surrounding this topic.  To clarify a few misconceptions, we (California Energy Storage Alliance, or ‘CESA’) teamed with the Charles Barnhart, the lead-author of the Stanford study, to set the record straight. The Stanford Study compared the energetic costs of energy storage resources to the energetic...

Tom Konrad CFA Flexible Graphene Sheet image via BigStock  Graphene is a crystalline form of carbon in which carbon atoms are arranged in a regular hexagonal pattern. It is very strong, light, and an excellent conductor of heat and electricity. It is also nearly transparent. New laboratory  techniques for creating large sheets of graphene, including a roll-to-roll production process, have triggered an explosion of research into new practical applications taking advantage of graphene’s unique properties. Some potential cleantech applications are solar cells, ultracapacitors, water filtration and...

Tom Konrad CFA Without a press release since June, and the stock price in the doldrums, investors have been looking for updates on Finavera Wind Energy (TSXV:FVR, OTC:FNVRF.  Disclosure: I own this stock.)  In fact, there has been an update: Finavera’s second quarter interim report, filed on August 28th on SEDAR, but without a press release or news articles, many investors seem to have missed it. Despite the lack of updates, progress continues behind the scenes, although Jason Bak, Finavera’s CEO is yet not able to say much about the ongoing initiatives.  On Friday, he told...

Jim Lane Businessman leaping photo via BigStock “The first cut is the deepest” goes the old saw no more so than in first commercial, first-of-kind advanced biofuels projects – especially when they are undertaken by newly-public companies under extraordinary scrutiny. In short, the KiOR (KIOR) story. And, as allegations fly, we look at the data on the ground and find that things are not always as they seem. Earlier this year, Phil New, the always interesting CEO of BP Biofuels, gave a rather extraordinary address in which...

KiOR Shows Its Gallons Jim Lane Landmark cellulosic drop-in biofuels producer releases update on early-stage production: is the increasing gallonage enough to silence the critics? Today, we head to the Chapel of Hard Data, and get closer to the music. Nobody walks slower, in public, than at a wedding or a funeral. In the case of KiOR (KIOR), the critics and supporters have been shouting loud as the company makes its slow, public march up the aisle towards steady-state operations. Most observers, sitting in the pews, have been unsure as to whether to be...

Doug Young China halts construction of new solar manufacturing plants Beijing took an important step towards rejuvenating the global solar panel sector last week when it announced new steps that will strictly limit new plant construction. This kind of government-led approach is a good short-term solution, as it will halt the introduction of new supply, which in turn will allow prices to stabilize after more than 2 years of steep declines caused by massive overcapacity. But over the longer term, China needs to address the...

Tom Konrad CFA Capstone Infrastructure Corp.'s Gas Cogeneration facility in Cardinal, Ontario. Capstone Infrastructure Corporation (TSX:CSE, OTC:MCQPF. Disclosure: I own this stock) is an international operator and developer of green infrastructure assets and utilities which is currently selling at a significant discount to most comparable firms.  I recently ran a comparison of six similar Canada-listed firms, and Capstone seemed much cheaper on several measures. The Discount The following chart compares five renewable energy and green infrastructure firms with most of their operations in Canada: Capstone, Algonquin Power and Utilities (TSX:AQN, OTC:AQUNF), Brookfield Renewable Energy Partners (NYSE:BEP),...

Five tips to help you make sense of the next sustainability report you read Reading Sustainability Reports photo via BigStock   By Marc Gunther. This article was first published on Ensia.com. Corporate sustainability reports have been around since … well, it’s hard to say.  The first report may have been published by “companies in the chemical industry with serious image problems” in the 1980s, or by Ben & Jerry’s in 1989 or Shell in 1997. No matter since then, more...

By Harris Roen The market is starting to notice that solar investing has been extremely profitable in 2013. As of the middle of September, the average solar stock is up over 50% in the past year, and over 15% in three months (that’s over 60% annualized!). These returns are taken from a broad list of about 60 publically traded companies in the solar industry (see chart above). Though all are involved in solar, solar may not be the primary business of many of these companies. For example, Panasonic (PCRFY) produces photovoltaics, but it is only a small...

by Jared Wiedmeyer For the past few years, solar industry stakeholders have imagined a future where the general public has the ability to invest in pure-play renewable energy real estate investment trusts (REITs) that finance and construct both utility-scale and distributed photovoltaic (PV) projects in the United States. While these stakeholders wait for this reality to come to fruition, existing REITs already have several options to own or develop solar projects that still allow them to comply with the IRS's asset and income tests.  This past May, Chadbourne & Park's Kelly Kogan and Scott Bank moderated a roundtable with...

David Appleyard LONDON The symbiotic match between the solar and energy storage sectors shows significant market promise and could see the sector yielding a US $2.8 billion market over the next five years, Assessing the emerging market for combined solar and energy storage, Lux Research analysts found that residential applications dominate through 2018. As lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries and overall storage arrays fall in price, residential systems will gain the most, growing to 382 MW in 2018, the report suggests. Meanwhile, the light commercial segment will increase to 220 MW although heavy commercial/industrial systems will...