Solar Photovoltaic

Doug Young Bottom line: New York IPO plans by a Canadian Solar unit and Solar Power Inc could auger a new wave of similar listings by Chinese new energy power plant builders, offering investors a higher growth alternative to traditional utilities. Just a day after solar panel maker Canadian Solar (Nasdaq: CSIQ) announced it has spun off its fast-growing solar power plant-building unit for a US listing, another China-based peer is discussing plans for a similar IPO. This time a company called Solar Power Inc is the one disclosing plans for a New York listing to raise...

By Jeff Siegel While solar bears and short-mongers celebrated the 8% dip in SolarCity (NASDAQ:SCTY) yesterday, opportunists are sniffing around for another buying opportunity. Especially those who didn't take my advice to load up after the stock fell below $50 back in March. What a bargain that was! In any event, SCTY took it on the chin yesterday, and I suspect there will continue to be some ebbs and flows in the near-term. Long-term, however, SCTY remains a solid play on the growth of solar in the United States. It's also worth noting that SCTY has just unveiled a...

Doug Young China halts construction of new solar manufacturing plants Beijing took an important step towards rejuvenating the global solar panel sector last week when it announced new steps that will strictly limit new plant construction. This kind of government-led approach is a good short-term solution, as it will halt the introduction of new supply, which in turn will allow prices to stabilize after more than 2 years of steep declines caused by massive overcapacity. But over the longer term, China needs to address the...

Xantrex Technology Inc. (XTX.TO) has been awarded US $873,000 from the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) under its Photovoltaics Manufacturing Research and Development Initiative. Xantrex will match the funding from NREL during the course of the project for a total budget of $1.74 Million. This program will take place at the Xantrex facility in Livermore, California. Xantrex PV inverters are America's leading choice for large-scale solar installations. Presently, utility-interactive, three-phase inverters are available in models ranging from 10 kW to 225 kW, and multiple inverters can be paralleled for larger power installations. ...

2009 is likely to be a watershed year for the solar photovoltaic (PV) industry, and one which many PV manufacturers will not survive.  Even before the credit crunch and plummeting housing market made capital intensive PV much harder to finance, the easing of supply constraints in the market for solar grade silicon meant that PV supply was liable to increase rapidly, putting pressure on marginal producers.  I expect that the loss of PV demand due to tighter credit markets will more than compensate for the added demand due to the extension of the solar Investment Tax Credit (ITC) and...

Tom Konrad Last week, Stock Gumshoe sleuthed out Jeff Seigel's recent tease of a "$0.62 Company Just Perfected Sunless Solar.”  The company is New Energy Technologies (NENE.OB), which was trading at $1.20 after the close on Friday.  Here's what the Gumshoe has to say about the company: And of course, maybe Siegel’s right, maybe these guys will be to First Solar what IBM was to Smith Corona … I’m just not holding my breath. For more information on the company, which did stage a demonstration of the technology in Tampa last month, you can certainly visit...

Net metering describes the requirement that an electric utility buy electricity from any of its customers that generate their own electricity (usually with some sort of renewable energy, such as solar or wind) at the same price that they sell it to the customer.  That seems fair, doesn't it? The Utility Perspective It doesn't seem fair to the utility.  Utilities do more than just generate and sell electricity to customers.  They also are responsible for transmission (delivering the electricity) and reliability (making sure that the lights work when you flip the switch.) Taking just the reliability requirement, suppose that...

James Montgomery Trade War. photo via Bigstock The European Commission has decided to recommend duties on Chinese solar panels up to 67.9 percent, according to reports from multiple sources. Wall Street Journal reports that the tariffs will affect more than 100 companies, and be implemented at a range from 37.3 to 67.9 percent at an average of 47.6 percent, close to projections earlier this week. Companies will face tariffs as follows: Suntech (STP) and its subsidiaries: 48.6 percent LDK Solar (LDK): 55.9 percent Trina Solar (TSL): 51.5 ...

To win the U.S. solar installation game, SolarCity (SCTY) continues to go vertical and thin its margin stack... so what'll be next? James Montgomery SolarCity (SCTY) is acquiring Zep Solar and its rackless mounting design in a $158 million stock deal, illustrating the growing importance of improving costs and complexity in residential solar. Much of the cost-cutting in solar PV has been shouldered by the upstream manufacturing side, but half the costs or more in a residential solar PV system come from the softer side, and they'll have to keep coming down dramatically to support widespread deployment of...

By Tim Conneally From a huge crop of Israeli cleantech companies, solar power optimization and management startup SolarEdge has filed for a $125 million initial public offering on the NASDAQ exchange. SolarEdge has been talking about IPO since 2011, but opted instead to work with venture capital through three separate funding rounds. By the time it completed its Series D, SolarEdge had raised a total of $37 million from more than ten venture capital groups. The company's CFO recently told Bloomberg that it was difficult to grow such a large company with only private money. An IPO was...

Doug Young Bottom line: Yingli’s downward spiral will continue as customers abandon the company due to its financial weakness. Shares of the stumbling Yingli (NYSE: YGE) are coming under pressure after its latest earnings report. The intense pressure solar panel makers continue to feel as their sector still struggles to recover from a downturn that dates back 4 years due to massive oversupply.  Panel prices have rebounded somewhat over the last 2 years and many of the best-run companies have returned to profitability during that time. But intense pressure still remains for less well-run companies like Yingli. ...

Silevo's Triex Solar Technology By Jeff Siegel DISCLOSURE: Long SCTY. SolarCity Corp. (NASDAQ: SCTY) has signed a deal to acquire Silevo, a solar panel technology and manufacturing company on June 16th. With Silevo now in the fold, SolarCity is in discussions with the state of New York to build a new manufacturing plant with a targeted capacity in excess of one gigawatt – within two years. Upon completion, this will be one of the largest solar panel production plants in the world. Although there are plenty...

Doug Young Bottom line: New signals indicate Beijing plans to move aggressively to prevent solar panel makers from adding unneeded new capacity to help their local governments meet economic growth targets. A new low-key announcement from Beijing is hinting at a quiet struggle taking place behind the scenes in China’s promising but embattled solar panel sector, with the regulator saying it will stop the building of most new manufacturing capacity. On one side of this struggle are local government officials, who may be encouraging solar panel makers in their areas to add capacity that will benefit their...

I just got around to reading a new report by Merrill Lynch (link at the end of this article) identifying cleantech as "The Sixth Revolution" (the other five being: Industrial Revolution; Age of Steam & Railways; Age of Steel, Electricity and Heavy Engineering; Age of Oil, the Automobile and Mass Production; and Age of Info and Telecommunications). Periodically, sell-side firms will release free cleantech/alt energy reports, which lay out their macro theses but stop short of providing stock picks to non-clients. I don't generally pay these reports too much attention as I find they rarely - if ever...

It's no mystery by now that the credit crisis has been nothing short of a disaster for solar PV stocks. For one thing, risk has been re-priced on an unprecedented scale, and the solar PV sector is, by most measures, a very risk sector. Rising debt costs in an industry where projects typically use between 50 and 70% leverage were bound to take their toll. It also hasn't helped that most people pre-crisis predicted a significant glut of solar PV supply in 2009 on the back of markedly lower silicon prices. Lastly, concerns over the sustainability of generous...