Electric Grid

I'm a fan of investing in electricity transmission, both because the grid in the US is in a sad state of repair, and because considerable expansions to the grid will be needed to take large scale renewable energy (especially concentrating solar and wind) from the lightly inhabited areas with renewable energy resources to population and demand centers. Unfortunately, the need  for new transmission can put renewable energy advocates at odds with more traditional environmentalists, who are concerned about the local damage to views and habitat caused by new transmission lines.  Cases in point are opposition which looks...

Tom Konrad CFA Information technology has mostly passed the energy sector by... but for how long? Information Technology revolutionized the way we buy things (Amazon, eBay), how we get information (Google, Wikipedia, the decline of newspapers), and how we interact with out peers (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn.)  Yet so far, it has had little, if any transformative impact on energy.  Tim Healy, CEO of EnerNOC (ENOC), the world's largest  third party provider of Demand Response to utilities and grid operators, thinks that's about to change. Demand Response (DR) began decades ago with Interruptible loads and Interruptible rates,...

Like Quanta Services, (#8 in this series), National Grid PLC (NYSE:NGG) allows investors to participate in the massive build out of electricity transmission and distribution infrastructure necessitated by years of neglect and the growing need to decarbonize our electric infrastructure.  See the article linked above for more detail on these two forces driving the sector. Having its origins in British electricity deregulation in the 1990s, Nation Grid is a regulated utility in Britain and the United States, and operates high pressure gas pipelines and high voltage transmission in Britain, and electricity transmission and natural gas distribution in the Northeastern...

by Debra Fiakas CFA Solar power producers have many challenges.  One is the direct current to alternating current dilemma.  Solar panels create power that flows one way in a direct current (DC).  We use electricity in our homes and businesses in alternating current (AC) that flows both directions, forward and backward.  So solar cell producers must use solar inverters that convert the electricity from the direct current in the solar panel into alternating current. This is where Advanced Energy Industries, Inc. (AEIS:  Nasdaq) comes in. AEIS makes power inverters for the solar power industry.  The...

Paul Schwabe Among renewable resources, one of the most valuable attributes of geothermal electricity is the baseload characteristic of the energy resource. That is, geothermal electricity generators are able to deliver a stable level of power production over time. Yet for better or worse, this baseload characteristicalong with other notable factors such as size constraints and varying market segmentsreveals that interconnecting a geothermal plant to a transmission or distribution system poses unique challenges compared to other renewable energy technologies . A recent report by NREL, "Geothermal Power and Interconnection: The Economics of Getting to the Market," delves...

by Debra Fiakas CFA Last week PowerSecure International (POWR:  Nasdaq) announced the award of orders valued at $100 million for new solar projects.  About 15% of the work will be completed in the final quarter of this year and the rest of the revenue will be recorded in 2016.  The announcement sent investors into a tizzy.  PowerSecure reported $283.4 million in total sales for the twelve months ending March 2015, primarily for solar power infrastructure and smart grid technology destined for electric utilities and microgrids.  Securing orders equivalent to 35% of its current revenue run rate...

Maintaining and expanding the world's electric power grids in order to avoid stupendous blackouts, add gigawatts of green power, and bring electricity to a billion additional people, will cost hundreds of billions of dollars over the next 10 years. Retrofitting just the U.S. power grid will cost $130 billion, estimates the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). China has earmarked $135 billion to upgrade and expand its high-voltage grid. India will need to spend billions if it has any hope of reaching its goal of increasing electrical generation capacity to 200 GW by 2012 from roughly 150 GW currently. Among...

The Strongest Strong Grid Stocks Tom Konrad, CFA A comparison of the financial strength of transmission (or "Strong Grid") companies. In Part I of this article I made the case that transmission stocks, or "Strong Grid" might be a clean energy sector that takes off in 2010, as Smart Grid stocks and Battery stocks did in 2009.  If the sector does take off, the rising tide will probably float all boats, but if it doesn't, it will probably be better to be in the strongest such companies, because, as in 2009, the harsh financial climate will probably mean that...

The Solar Investment Tax Credit has been extended, and the market for mortgage debt "rescued," but neither renewable energy nor the rest of the economy are out of the woods.  We'll probably be feeling the effects of the financial imbalances which have built up in our economy for years to come. While the extension of the tax credit will help renewable energy technologies raise funding, the headwinds from the continued fallout of the structured finance and real estate bubble will be blowing in the other direction.  This will be a problem both for developers of new technologies, and...

by Michael Giberson If completed, the Tres Amigas project will encourage renewable power development and efficient power flows.  Publicly traded wind power and superconducting cable company American Superconductor Corp. (Nasdaq: AMSC) is a large minority shareholder and the planned supplier. Tres Amigas LLC has proposed building a three-way superconducting HVDC link between the three separate power systems that span the United States and much of Canada: the Eastern Interconnection, the Western Interconnection, and the Texas (ERCOT) Interconnection.  The three systems currently are linked by a small number of separate and relatively unimportant DC interties.  The proposed three-way...

Bill Paul Lux Research forecast last week that the global smart grid market will grow some 250% over the next five years, reaching nearly $16 billion by 2015 compared with today’s $4.5 billion. Interestingly, Lux further forecast that only a few select firms will take full advantage of this looming largesse. It’s understandable why the payoff won’t be widely shared. As regulated entities (on the transmission and distribution side), electric utilities have an obligation (specifically, the time-honored “obligation to serve”) that effectively requires that they be conservative when partnering with IT firms that can provide the money-saving,...

Part 1 of 2 Bill Paul Looking for alternative energy stocks with undiscovered potential? Who isn't? Here are three possibilities (with three more to come next week). You can decide for yourself whether they are worth further investigation. First up: PFB Corporation, which trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol PFB. Calgary-based PFB is an energy efficiency play. The company makes insulating building products that it sells under branded names in commercial and residential markets in North America and Japan. The company most recently reported third quarter net income of $1.6 million or 24 cents vs. $1.1...

7.17.09 Storage Week John Petersen Infocast’s Storage Week was all I had hoped it would be, and more. While I thoroughly enjoyed serving on three discussion panels and was warmly received by roughly 250 attendees, including executives of companies that I've occasionally criticized, the most important value for me came from the opportunity to hear four days of high-level presentations by industry executives, national thought leaders and policymakers who repeatedly stressed that: From a utility perspective grid-based energy storage is the functional equivalent of an instantly...

Microinverters are being used in smaller commercial solar installations, but the industry is in flux and coming regulations may drastically change the playing field.

by Debra Fiakas CFA My recent post “Bull Case in Rick Perry’s Grid Study” highlighted efforts by U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry to help the coal industry with a study of the U.S. electrical grid.  Coal has long claimed advantage as a ‘dispatchable’ power source, i.e. a consistently available power source suitable to supply power for the base load.  Technology is making base load less important.  Indeed, modernized or ‘smart’ electrical grids are making it possible to take advantage of low-cost renewable power sources even though they produce power intermittently and are therefore considered ‘not dispatchable’. ...