Ten Solid Clean Energy Companies to Buy on the Cheap: #6: Sharp Corporation (SHCAY.PK)
I don't write frequently about solar stocks, especially photovoltaic (PV) manufacturers. While the industry is almost certain to be a spectacular growth story, it's also a story that everyone already seems to know about. Trader Mark put it well: "these stocks are too driven by retail hands." The PV story clicks with people, and when that happens, they often buy stocks with little regard to what they are worth. PV stocks are so psychological, we'd all do well to lie down on a couch before buying. As the IRS is unlikely to allow psychotherapy as an "investing expense," I...
Ten Solid, Clean Companies Ready For Stimulus, and Five That Aren’t
by Tom Konrad Last February, I wrote " I expect the Fed-induced reprieve to be fairly short lived, ten solid companies I'd be happy to buy more of if and when the bottom really falls out of the market." When I wrote those words, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was over 12,700. Now, it's around 8,500, and I doubt anyone remembers the "Fed-induced reprieve" I was referring to. The "bottom fell out" in September and October. On October 12, with the DJIA at 8451, I wrote "I don’t know where the market will go from here, but I...
US Crawls Closer to Energy Policy
by Debra Fiakas CFA Last week President Obama signed into law the Energy Efficiency Improvement Act of 2015. The law is intended to reduce energy requirements in commercial buildings, manufacturing facilities and residential structures. The law improves building codes, provides assistance to manufactures to achieve energy efficiency and paves the way for conservation activities by federal agencies. It is the closest thing the United States has to an energy policy…..so far. It took years to get this small piece of energy policy through Congress. Indeed, at one point in its convoluted travels through the House of...
The Light at the End of the Tunnel is Energy Efficient
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...
Political Developments in Energy Efficiency
This article is part of a series on the WGA Energy Efficient Buildings Workshop. Governor Ritter After arriving slightly late (a gunman had been shot by state troopers outside his office the day before.) Bill Ritter kicked off the workshop with his thoughts on energy efficiency. Other than the Governator, I don't know of any other state governor in the US who understands renewable energy as well as Governor Ritter. And he's dedicated to learning more; when I attended a fundraiser early in his campaign last year, he had not yet heard about plug-in hybrids, but in a...
Looking for Cash in Old Refrigerators
by Debra Fiakas CFA
Appliance Recycling Centers of America (ARCI: NYSE) is a typical small company, toiling away in seeming obscurity and struggling to get proper valuation of their success. There is little glamour in old refrigerators and washing machines, but ARCA has figured out how to wring cash from recycling our household appliances. In the last three fiscal years the company converted 1.6% of sales to operating cash flow.
Unfortunately, things have turned a bit sour in the world of old Frigidaires and tired Maytags. Last week ARCA reported financial results for the quarter ending September 2015. The company suffered...
The Spray Foam Industry: Moving to Soy?
by Scott Schnelle As an energy consultant for home retrofits, I often have customers and acquaintances ask my opinion regarding green technologies and energy efficient products. Undoubtedly, with the recent surge of the green movement and a shift toward becoming more environmentally sustainable, now is a great time to invest in these types of products. One product that has been getting more and more attention lately is spray foam. The product itself has been around for many years, but it has recently risen in popularity for a couple of reasons. Here, I’ll discuss spray foam briefly...
Zumtobel Turns LED into Dividends
by Debra Fiakas CFA Based on Austria, Zumtobel Group (ZMTBF: OTC or ZAG: Vienna) is a supplier of modern lighting products using Light Emitting Diode (LED) technology. Zumtobel sells its lights and components under three international brands Thorn, Tridonic and Zumtobel and two regional brands ACDC and Reiss. Zumtobel has a long history in lighting with its foundation in the 1950s in Dr. Zumtobel’s Electrogerate und Kunstharzpresswerk. The Thorn brand, which was acquired in 2000, dates back to the 1920s when founder Jules Thorn set up the Electric Lamp Service Company. Zumtobel sells lights in over...
Misreported Revenue, Part I: Lime Energy
Tom Konrad CFA In my model portfolios of ten clean energy stocks for 2013 andsix alternatives, three companies are currently delaying earnings announcements for various reasons, and at least two of the three will be restating previous results. Many investors flee the scene at the first whiff of accounting problems: All investors rely on a company’s financial statements (directly or indirectly) to value companies. If there is any doubt as to the accuracy of those statements, they believe it’s better to invest elsewhere. In contrast, I believe that we never have anything like an accurate picture of what is going on...
Ten LED Stocks, and a Wildcard
Tom Konrad CFA Clean Edge says the phase-out of incandescent light bulbs is opening the way for low-cost LEDs. These are the stocks to know. Federal regulations are flipping the switch on our love affair with incandescent light bulbs. Research firm Clean Edge's just-released Clean Energy Trends 2011 says this opens the way for a clean energy trend to watch: With compact-fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs the only legal competition in much of the world, Light-Emitting Diode (LED) bulbs need only the arrival of an affordable replacement for the standard 60 watt bulb in order to be met...
EnerNOC: Demand Response IPO
Lunch with an Efficiency Expert Yesterday, I had lunch with Howard Geller, Ph.D., one of our nation's leading experts in energy efficiency and energy policy. Howard is the director of the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project (SWEEP), former Executive Director of ACEEE, and has a Doctorate in Energy Policy from the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. My first question for industry experts is which companies are doing good things in their feilds, and I was especially interested in Howard's answers because energy efficiency is so much more difficult to pin down than most other types of...
Lighting Science Group Purchase
Lighting Science Group Corp. (LSGP.OB) has been on my watchlist for several months. They design and market energy efficient lighting solutions with long lasting LED bulbs that can be quickly deployed in existing lighting applications and produce immediate cost savings and environmental benefits. Some key events that have attracted me to this company: They recently moved to the OTC BB off the pink sheets.They recently received a private placement of almost $7 millionAfter a several year absence they are finally a fully reporting companyThey are currently far from being profitable, but the trend on the balance sheet is...
Climate Change & Corporate Disclosure: Should Investors Care?
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...
Energy Recovery Recovers Its Own Energy
by Debra Fiakas CFA Energy Recovery (ERII: Nasdaq) has announced a breakthrough license of its hydraulic fracturing pump to oil and gas patch service provider Schlumberger (SLB: NYSE). Called the Vorteq by Energy Recovery, the pump features the company’s core pressure exchange technology, representing an entirely new approach to driving the chemical-laced water producers send deep into the earth to extract oil and gas. Energy Recovery develops and markets components and equipment for fluid flow and pressure cycles found industrial processes. Its patented pressure exchange devices are designed to take advantage of energy created in...
Ten Alternative Energy Speculations for 2008: LEDs and Ultracaps
Investing in Renewable Energy Stocks seldom fails to be exciting, although it can lead to crushing losses as well as mouthwatering gains (Think Ethanol stocks and Thin Film Solar in 2007.) With this in mind, I usually emphasize that the majority of most investors portfolios should be targeted towards larger, profitable companies, especially those focused on Energy Efficiency rather than the more sexy Renewable Energy technologies. This is the philosophy behind Alternative Energy Stocks' Blue Chip Portfolio: companies which aren't sexy, but which still are well positioned to take advantage of rising oil prices and increasing efforts to reduce...
Analyzing Greystone Logistics
by Roel Aerts
Greystone Logistics (GLGI) designs and manufactures plastic pallets for the logistics industry. They use recycled plastic which would otherwise be destined for landfill. They grind and pelletize the plastic in house. Injection molding and proprietary resin blend is used to manufacture the pallets.
Greystone is headquartered in Oklahoma and has its manufacturing plant in Iowa.
Recent results and Financials
· The company had invested heavily in manufacturing equipment several years ago, that loaded them with quite some debt. Over the last years they worked on a massive reduction in debt. In 2 years they reduced it from 21.6M$ to 9.4M$...
