Books, Reports, Webcasts & Podcasts

Alt Energy Stocks Analyst Tom Konrad will join a televised roundtable discussion with EnergyTechStocks' Managing Editor Bill Paul and Ardour Global Indexes' Joseph LaCorte this Friday. The discussion will center around the topic of investing in alternative energy. The program, entitled WealthTrack with Consuelo Mack, will air on PBS between November 9th and 12th, after which it will be available for online viewing here.  You can find a listing of stations carrying the show with airtimes at the end of this article. Bill Paul may be familiar to our readers because of the series of articles he wrote following...

The American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE), the Renewable Energy Resources Committee of the American Bar Association (SEER Section) and the Renewable Energy Committee of the Energy Bar Association are organizing a teleconference on the state of play with climate change regulations across the US. The teleconference is entitled State and Federal Green House Gas Regulation: Current Status, Outlook, and Implications for Renewable Energy (click on the link for details). The good thing about it is that it's only $20 to participate and free if you are a student. (DISCLOSURE: We are not affiliated with, or otherwise...

Thanks to Bill Paul (see below) for the heads up on an interesting video on alt energy geared toward an investor audience. The video is available on Consuelo Mack's Wealthtrack website. Click on "Wealthtrack Video on Demand" on the right-hand side and select the clip dated 01/12/07. It should be under "Current Programs" for a little while longer and will then be moved to "Archive Programs". The video consists of a 25-minute discussion between the anchor and the following 3 guests: Bill Paul, former WSJ reporter and author of the newly-released book "Future Energy: How the New...

Many of our Canadian readers will have heard about this already, but better later than never. CIBC World Markets, the corporate banking arm of Canadian bank CIBC, made "a significant realignment in equity portfolio this month by reducing position in energy stocks from a 4.5-percentage-point overweight to a 3-percentage-point overweight", citing increasing risks linked to efforts by North American governments to reduce energy consumption and limit greenhouse gas emissions. CIBC WM made the announcement in its latest Canadian Portfolio Strategy Outlook report (PDF document), released on Monday Feb. 5. I decided to discuss this...

A new report by Merril Lynch and the World Resources Institute (WRI), entitled “Alternatives for the clean car evolution��?, provides good background on regulatory and other forces driving the trend toward cleaner cars, as well as 3 ways to play this trend. The report first looks at air quality-related issues and lists 3 things to watch out for in the near term: (1) legal issues surrounding the classification of CO2 as a pollutant in the Clean Air Act, (2) whether governments, especially in Europe but eventually in the US, include road transport in their plans to fight climate...

Q1 2007 Renewable Energy Country Attractiveness Indices Ernst & Young recently released its Q1 2007 Renewable Energy Country Attractiveness Indices, a series of indices that rank countries on their attractiveness with regards to alternative energy growth and development. These indices provide good yardsticks for investors who want to know which markets offer the best near and long term alt energy growth prospects. The report presents three main indices, whose names are fairly self-explanatory: (1) The All Renewables Index (2) The Long-term Wind Index (>2 years) (3) The Near-term...

The Distributed Energy Financial Group LLC (DEFG) and Market Strategies Inc. (MSI) released, on Wednesday, the results of their Third Annual Alternative Energy Market Survey. This report is based on a online survey of 450 "industry leaders". Unsurprisingly, survey participants remain very bullish on revenue growth in the sector, expecting aggregate revenues to grow by 87% in 2007. That growth, several agree, will continue to be driven in part by strong support by various levels of governments. Some other interesting bits information from the survey: - While energy is forecasted to continue being...

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...

TheStreet.com is running a video segment on solar power as part of its Wallstrip series. The segment's date is 03/20/2007. If you're a long-term solar follower you definitely won't learn too much here. Nevertheless, the vid does a good job of outlining governmental efforts to boost the growth of solar in the US. Short and interesting. The segment is especially positive on: FirstSolar and Trina Solar . Positive on: Canadian Solar , Ascent Solar and Suntech Power . Negative on: Sunpower Corp .

I recently got around to reading Deutsche Asset Management's (DeAM) note on investing in climate change (PDF document). There is very little original work in this paper. Most of the tables and figures are derived from existing studies by the likes of McKinsey, the IPCC and New Energy Finance, to name a few. The paper synthesizes publicly-available information on cleantech and climate change trends into a broad investment thesis. DeAM sees investment opportunities as falling in two main categories: Adaptation (e.g. water management, disaster control, infrastructure) and Mitigation (renewable energy, clean power gen, energy efficiency). They identify four...

Just as I was attending a debate this morning that touched, partly, on the desirability of implementing an emissions trading system to control greenhouse gas emissions, I received an email from Market Watch informing me that they were running a special report on climate change and cleantech investing. The report features a very interesting collection of articles indeed. If you have about 1/2 hour to spare, I would recommend going through all of them. The following topics are covered: a) Global warning and the insurance industry b) Al Gore and David Blood's investment venture c)...

A few weeks ago, a reader sent me a link to the second edition of Lehman Brothers' The Business of Climate Change report (PDF document). I unfortunately only got around to reading through it tonight. Over the past two years, several of the big sell-side shops have published reports discussing the major investment opportunities and risks related to global warming. This one is a tad different from other such reports. The discussion is far more academic (rather than focused around actionable information) and the authors do not provide a list of potential outperformers organized by sector. Nevertheless,...

Charles Morand This is the third installment of my review of the book book "Investment Opportunities for a Low Carbon World". The second installment covered geothermal power and energy efficiency and the first installment covered wind and solar. This post reviews three interrelated chapters on the world of cleantech and alt energy indices, funds and ETFs. Two of these three chapters are my favorite in the book so far -  they provide very useful information for the novice investor with an interest in alt energy investing but limited time and knowledge for successful stock picking.  Cleantech...

Allow me to introduce this post by saying that I wholeheartedly welcome the firming of a new trend in North America: namely viewing climate change as a value creation, rather than as a value destruction, proposition. For the better part of the past decade, the climate change debate has been dominated by the the views of a small-yet-powerful collection of business actors with a lot to loose from seeing governments regulate greenhouse gases (GHG). This group, with its tremendous political influence, did everything that it could to stymie meaningful debate on the climate question, tirelessly arguing that moving...

Charles Morand On Monday morning, I received an e-copy of a new research note by BofA Merrill Lynch arguing that disclosure by publicly-listed companies on the issue of climate change was becoming increasingly "important". The note claimed: "e believe smart investors and companies will recognize the edge they can gain by understanding low carbon trends." I couldn't agree more with that statement. It was no coincidence that on that same day the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a non-profit UK-based organization that surveys public companies each year on the state of their climate change awareness, was...

Unsuprisingly, CNBC featured several segments yesterday on alt energy and Bush's State of the Union Address. I picked out 3 that I particularly liked. 1) Rich Asplund, Melvin Securities Equity Analyst; and Garvin Jabusch, Sierra Club Stock Fund Portfolio Manager, discuss the US ethanol industry and make a couple of alt energy stock picks. Neither analyst is particularly bullish on corn-based ethanol but both are on solar. More specifically, they both like Suntech Power . The other pick is Itron because of its exposure to smart metering technology. 2) A discussion on what tighter fuel...