Plug-in Vehicles

Tom Konrad CFA Stop debating the viability of electric cars, and work on fixing our broken transportation paradigm. My friend and colleague John Petersen has it in for the electric car.  Recently he wrote a summary of his anti-electric car views, entitled "It's Time to Kill the Electric Car, Drive a Stake Through its Heart and Burn the Corpse."  Did I mention he also has a flair for the dramatic?  Many electric vehicle (EV) advocates, or "EVangelists," as he calls them, have tried to refute his arguments.  One of the more coherent...

Tom Konrad CFA   My friend and frequent electric vehicle (EV) critic John Petersen recently worried that Tesla (NASD:TSLA) shareholders now buying the stock because of the launch of the company’s new Model S were doomed to lose money, since the company is just entering the “trough of disillusionment,” as shown in this stylized diagram of the losses a company suffers in the Valley of Death from Osawa and Miyazaki. Although Petersen is relentlessly negative on EVs, he has a great depth of experience with launching new technologies, and...

Denny Schlesinger Machiavelli's The Prince and Sun Tzu's The Art of War are the two best known classic treatises on strategies to conquer and to govern. As Kandi Technology Group's electric vehicle strategy unfolds, I'm reminded of these masterpieces. The Challenges There are many of them. To start with, the current personal land transportation paradigm, the internal combustion engine, is not just well entrenched, it is becoming more efficient as time goes by. The fears of peak oil are vastly exaggerated specially now that fracking technology has added billions of barrels of recoverable...

by Sean Kidney Tesla issues $600m, 5yr EV convertible bond Tesla Motors’ inaugural bond issue has been, as you’d expect, electrifying (just had to say that). The US electric sports car manufacturer has just issued a 5 year, $600m convertible bond in a fundraising program which has seen it raise approximately $1bn through shares and convertible bonds. Coupon is 1.5-2%; conversion premium is 35%; bookrunners were JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley. Tesla had planned to raise $450m through convertible bonds, but this was raised to $600m after strong demand from investors. That demand allowed Tesla to drop what was going to be a 2-2.5% coupon down to...

Doug Young Bottom line: A new report spotlighting suspicious sales by BYD shows that last year’s EV explosion in China was fueled by people seeking to pocket government subsidies. A story from China’s new energy (electric) vehicle space is shining a spotlight on the challenges companies are facing after becoming too reliant on government support. It is a twisted tale involving electric car maker BYD (HKEx: 1211, OTC:BYDDF), and shows how its boom in sales last year may have been largely due to big government rebates for buyers. BYD experienced a rocky road over...

by Clean Energy Intel Tesla Model S.  Image used with permission from Tesla   Last week was a very good week for Tesla (TSLA) stock - up 13% on the day on Thursday and ending the week at $32.31, up a solid 8.2% from the previous Friday's close. This was partly because the company's earnings statement provided a loss that was below expectations - but probably largely a result of the announcement that the company has secured another deal with Mercedes. Tesla's third-quarter net loss widened to $65.1...

Tom Konrad CFA Once again, John Petersen  has gone too far with his petrol-head arguments against Electric Vehicles (EVs.) In a recent article fetchingly titled, Why The Electric Vehicle House of Cards Must Fall, he argues that because "the incremental cost of vehicle electrification an up-front capital investment of $190 for each equivalent barrel of oil saved." Since the oil price currently barely tops $100, he considers this (to put it mildly) a bad investment.  He concludes, Electric drive proponents are selling a house of cards based on fundamentally flawed assumptions and glittering...

by Debra Fiakas CFA New Jersey-based NRG Energy, Inc. (NRG:  NYSE)  NRG serves about 2.8 million customers in the northeastern U.S. with electricity generated from a mix of conventional and renewable power sources  - 95 fossil fuel and nuclear power plants, 14 utility-scale solar power plants, and 35 wind farms.  It has been good business for NRG, raking in $16.2 billion in total sales in the twelve months ending March 2015.  NRG converted $1.4 billion of those sales to operating cash.  That helps support a dividend payout policy that will put $0.58 per share in holders’ pockets next...

Part I Arthur Porcari. Ever hear of China based NASDAQ listed Kandi Technologies (KNDI)? If you haven't, you're not alone. No financial writers, no analysts, and no significant institutions or funds are interested.  But they should be.  This series will go into the reasons why. In part II, we'll look at the company's business and history : Kandi is already selling EV mini-cars by the thousands.   Kandi landed a joint venture with three multi-billion dollar Companies for quick-change battery charging, with the first stations opening in November. Owns a mortgage free modern ten...

Doug Young Bottom line: Tesla’s weak China performance owes mostly to its lackluster marketing to wealthy, status-conscious Chinese car fanatics, but its situation could quickly improve if it finds a new marketing-savvy country head. After roaring into China last year on a wave of hugely positive publicity, electric car superstar Tesla (Nasdaq: TSLA) has rapidly lost momentum and now appears on the cusp of a major overhaul in a bid to jump-start its prospects. This kind of development isn’t hard to understand, as Tesla’s charismatic CEO Elon Musk set the...

John Petersen This Saturday marks the second anniversary of my blog, which began with an article titled Lithium-ion Batteries and Centerfolds. Over time my archive has grown to 142 articles on energy storage devices, the companies that make them and their crucial role as enabling technologies for wind and solar power, transportation and the smart grid. While cleantech bloggers usually focus on new technologies that might be game-changers, I'd rather focus on major enhancements to proven technologies from established industry leaders. The reason is simple, hot new technologies have limited investment value if the world can't produce enough...

John Petersen Thanks to a recent comment from JLBR, I've found a new hero in Dr. Peter Z. Grossman, an economics professor from Butler University who cogently argues that government attempts to force alternative energy technologies into an R&D model that was created for the Manhattan Project and refined for the Space Program will always result in commercial disaster because "the goal of the Apollo Program was the demonstration of engineering prowess while any alternative energy technology must succeed in the marketplace." In a recent article titled "The Apollo Fallacy and its Effect on U.S. Energy Policy" Dr....

By Jeff Siegel “My next car will definitely be a Tesla,” (NASD:TSLA) my Uber driver said with great enthusiasm. As he was driving me from the Hyatt in Newport Beach to John Wayne Airport, a Tesla P85D quietly flew passed us. It was black, shiny, and clearly driven by an individual that was in a hurry. He must've been doing at least 90, and this 20-something part-time Uber drive could barely control his excitement. While I certainly shared his enthusiasm, I was unsure of how a part-time Uber driver (I believe he was a college student driving for Uber to...

Clean Energy Intel BYD at the Central China High-Tech Fair, Shenzhen, November 2009.  Source: Wikipedia / Brucke-Osteuropa. Over the course of the past few weeks we have seen a couple of noteworthy developments at Chinese auto maker BYD (BYDDF.PK). I have previously discussed the troubles at BYD, which by mid-September had taken the stock down 72% year to date. However, a couple of developments suggest that the Warren Buffet-backed automaker is at least worth keeping an eye on in the period ahead. In late October, the company opened its US ...

By Jeff Siegel While I've long been an outspoken supporter of Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA), as well as a huge fan of both Elon Musk and the Model S, it is the company's smaller version of the Model S that gets me most excited. The bottom line is that cost will be the determining factor for most Americans considering electric cars. After all, you'd be hard-pressed to find many folks who wouldn't love to own a Model S. But at around $75,000, few can afford it. Of course, the vision of Tesla is not one based solely around supplying high-end...

John Petersen While I jumped the gun last week and published my third quarter outlook for the energy storage and vehicle electrification sectors early, it's worthwhile to take a look back and see how my tracking list of companies performed over the last quarter and examine the past to see what the tea leaves in the bottom of the cup portend for the coming quarter. So without further delay I'll present my price performance table for the second quarter that ended on Friday. Q-2 was a dreadful quarter for Maxwell Technologies (MXWL) and ZBB Energy...