Growing Market Skepticism Towards Chinese Renewable Energy

Bottom line: Weak share reactions to upbeat news from Trina, ReneSola and Ming Yang reflect investor skepticism towards new energy stocks, as they face lingering issues of overcapacity and phasing out of government subsidies. A flurry of upbeat news is in the headlines today from 3 of China’s largest new energy equipment makers, led by a return to the profit column for solar panel maker ReneSola (NYSE: SOL) after a year in the red. At the same time, wind power equipment maker Ming Yang (NYSE: MY) also announced its latest quarterly results that were quite upbeat, and solar panel...

The EIA’s Annual Energy Outlook 2007 (Early Release) is Out

A quick post to inform our readers that the Energy Information Administration has just published an 'early release' version of its 2007 Annual Energy Outlook. Topics covered include: Energy Trends to 2030 Economic Growth Energy Prices Energy Consumption Energy Intensity Electricity Generation Energy Production and Imports Carbon Dioxide Emissions Along with this table outlining a range of energy-related projections to 2030 (PDF document), including revisions from 2006 projections.

Seven Indian Clean Energy Stocks

by Sneha Shah Raja Ravi Varma's portrait of the Hindu goddess of wealth, Lakshmi, ലക്ഷ്മി ദേവി. via Wikimedia Commons Why Invest in Indian Green Energy India is set to become the 3rd largest market for wind energy after USA and China and is set to enter the top 10 club of countries in installing solar energy capacity in 2012. Massive power deficits, millions of people without power, billions of dollars in oil, gas and coal imports imply that India offers massive opportunities for renewable energy generation. In fact Indian solar ...

The Truth Ain’t That Incovinient Anymore, So What’s Next?

I attended Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth lecture in Toronto tonight. I assume many of you have seen the movie so I'm not going to go into the details of the presentation, which is essentially the same as the movie give-or-take a couple of slides. Instead, I'm going to share with you some of the thoughts I had as I was listening to the former VP. Firstly, I bought this whole climate change thing a long time ago and I've seen the movie, so substantively I got very little out of this. As with the movie, I...

Feeling Feeling Blue About Green? Reasons for Cleantech Optimism…

David Gold There are so many easy reasons to be a pessimist today:  the world financial crisis, the discord and dysfunction in Washington, and the almost certain doom that many scientists claim we are facing from global warming. With the first high profile cleantech company failures, the euphoria of the cleantech bubble has burst creating pessimism about the future of cleantech as a whole.  I say, hogwash!  History says we have many reasons to be optimistic.  Just because things look bad today doesn’t mean the world is coming to an end!  We humans have a hard...

If Energy Were Free and Unlimited…

David Gold As soon as gas prices rise, our nation becomes focused on energy.  When they drop again, it falls off most consumers’ radar.  Yet the importance of energy goes way beyond the cost of filling up your gas tank or paying your electric bill.  In often-extraordinary ways, energy is interwoven into absolutely everything that we need to live or that we love to do.  One of the most useful tricks I learned in engineering school is that to put any problem in perspective, it helps to ask what if things were...

Alternative Energy & Conventional Energy: Is An Image Worth A Thousand Words?

It wasn't long ago that people still believed the price of energy commodities - and crude oil in particular - had a greater impact on alt energy stocks than did general movements in equity markets or even fundamental factors. The logic went something like this: even though oil and most of the sub-sectors that make up the broad alt energy space (e.g. solar) are not in direct competition with one-another, expensive oil is the number one driver behind governments searching for alternatives to the way we currently meet our energy needs. For a time, this theory may have...

Solar Energy Industry Association (SEIA) Tax Equity Conference Brief

I recently attended the Solar Energy Industry Association's (SEIA) Finance and Tax Seminar in New York. The subject matter in this event delved into issues related to tax equity finance.  Each panel session was moderated by a tax attorney or an accountant, and most of the content of the sessions consisted of technical tax law. To place the discipline into context, one speaker noted that the tax equity renewables investing deal volume in 2018 was $2-3B for solar and $9B for wind, and the number of tax equity participants is roughly only 25-35 large corporations.  So unless there are changes...

Interview with Tom Konrad on the CleanTech Show

An interview with our analyst, Tom Konrad, with Nick Bruse of The Cleantech Show is now available. In it, they discuss various strategies and the outlook for the Cleantech investment space, as well as some of Tom's ideas on industry regulation. You can download or listen to a podcast of the interview here.

Stock Picking For Green Investors (Presentation)

Here is a short presentation on stock picking for green investors by AltEnergyStocks Editor Tom Konrad CFA, Ph.D., with a couple stock picks.  I gave this presentation as part of a workshop on divestment from fossil fuels and investment in green stocks at the third annual Climate Solutions Summit.  The Divestment part is here.

New Energy IPOs

by Debra Fiakas CFA IPO Wordcloud photo via BigStock Investors looking for a piece of the public offering action from the alternative energy industry have been sorely disappointed in recent months.  The last big initial public offering in the sector was SolarCity, Inc. (SCTY:  Nasdaq) in December 2012.  Then in April 2013, there was an initial public offering of the REIT Hannon Armstrong Sustainable Infrastructure Capital (HASI:  Nasdaq).  Anyone looking for bragging rights to IPO shares will have to look to the...

The Peak Coal Portfolio

Last week, we alerted you to a report from Germany's Energy Watch Group called “Coal: Resources and Future Production,��? which predicts peak coal by 2025.  Readers of AltEnergyStocks are doubtless familiar with peak oil, the inevitable fact that as we consume a finite resource (oil reserves) at some point the rate of that consumption must peak, and taper off.  Serious arguments about peak oil center around "when" oil production (and consumption) will peak, not "if."   The same it true for other finite natural resources, such as natural gas, uranium, and even coal.  The difference with coal is the received...

Power Plant Costs & The Case For Energy Efficiency

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a presentation that was given by FERC officials on the phenomenon of rapidly rising costs in US power generation (presentation link at the end of this post). The FERC, or Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, is America's energy watchdog. The presentation begins by noting that across America's major electricity hubs, power prices are up significantly on last year (between 62% in the Midwest and 123% in NYC) and that, unfortunately, this probably isn't an anomaly. In fact, the presentation argues, there may be something secular at play. Two main trends are noted....

Forbes Is “Betting On Green Stocks”

Just a heads up that Forbes is running, on its website, a short slide show entitled "Betting On Green Stocks". The magazine "queried some of the top-performing investment newsletter editors who cover green stocks for a few of their favorite current ideas." Stocks discussed are: First Solar , SunPower , Medis Technologies , Suntech Power Holdings , and Fording Canadian Coal Trust .

REDI-ing Your Portfolio for a Low-Carbon Economy

Tom Konrad, CFA Colorado's recently released Renewable Energy Development Infrastructure (REDI) report looks at what the resource-rich state needs to do to accomplish the state goal of reducing CO2 emissions 20% from 2005 levels by 2020.  Investors who expect the developed world to attempt similar cuts in emissions should take note of the report's conclusions, and invest accordingly. Since Colorado Governor Bill Ritter recruited my friend Morey Wolfson for the Colorado Governor's Energy Office (GEO) he's had a lot less time to socialize with the rest of us in the clean energy community, but we caught up over lunch...

Sprott’s Peak Oil Watch

While browsing the web this morning, I came across a very interesting section on Peak Oil on Sprott Asset Management's website (best viewed with Explorer). Sprott Asset Management is a Toronto-based boutique investment management company that I consider, for lack of a better term, pretty cool. They have taken some relatively unorthodox commodities bets in the past and have often won them. For instance, they spotted the bull market in uranium very early on and did well as a result (PDF document). There are many web-based Peak Oil resources out there, so you may wonder why I decided...
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