Jul 05
With all my discussion about Solar Energy and the rise in Gas prices, here’s a timely Mike Keefe cartoon from the Denver Post;
Enjoy the weekend!
Joe
Jun 25
I just caught a story titled “McCain call for $300 million prize for car battery”. The prize is offered “for the development of a battery package that has the size, capacity, cost and power to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars.” There’s a part of this that I think is great, regular reader know I am excited about solar power and the prospects for a 21st century electric car. I was encouraged to hear McCain interviewed on CNBC and state that the goal should be to create an electric car that combined a charged range of 240 miles along with a plug in fast recharge capability. If nothing else, this shows he ‘gets it’ and knows what the goal is.
Now, reading that he’d like to be able to offer this challenge, it appears at first blush to be a ‘put your money where your mouth is’ approach. I think the intention is good, but the number may not be so high to get any attention. We currently have the X Prize, a series of prizes that include one for this very goal, and with a $10 million prize.
I think that the $300M may be better spent promoting Solar Power in general along with storage technologies that may overlap the automotive use. Even if solar cells were free, there would be an issue of storage, and we have a crisis that goes beyond just the current high oil prices. Solar can solve multiple issues, but storage is key, without it, we are missing a vital link in the enegy chain.
Joe
Jun 18
Usually, such questions are rhetorical. By I have an answer to this one. They are so stupid that yesterday the Associated Press reported, “Republicans for the second time in a week prevented the Senate from taking up a tax bill providing more than $50 billion in renewable energy credits and tax breaks for families and businesses.” I wrote in Bad Energy Mojo a couple weeks back that congress was still bickering over this, but the news came out yesterday that they defeated this bill. Some things are simply beyond my comprehension, add this to my list.
Jun 06
From an Op-Ed piece in a recent New Your Times story titled, “Dumb as We Wanna Be“:
“Congress has been bickering over whether and how to renew the investment tax credit to stimulate investment in solar energy and the production tax credit to encourage investment in wind energy. The bickering has been so poisonous that when Congress passed the 2007 energy bill last December, it failed to extend any stimulus for wind and solar energy production. Oil and gas kept all their credits, but those for wind and solar have been left to expire this December.”
Dumb, indeed. Our congresspeople are talking about windfall profit tax out of the left side of their mouths while voting for oil and gas credits from the right. As Seinfeld would say, “what’s up with that?”
Joe
Jun 02
Sometimes I struggle to choose a title for my posts. You see, there are many times that a potential reader will glance at a title and read or skip the post based on those few words. Other titles I considered for todays were, “Did Congressman Hinchey cut class that day?”, “Stupid Congressional Tricks”, “Repealing the Law of Supply and Demand”, and “Hinchey is a @#$%’ing moron”. That last one was a bit harsh as I have no other experience with this Gentleman from New York, and this post is regarding this one story that came to my attention.
Straight from WBNG (Binghamton, NY) news comes this news soundbite; “In the short term, Hinchey will outline a variety of new legislative steps on which he is working, including a bill that would give the president the authority to cap gas prices at $2.49 per gallon.”
Let me offer a simple, but illustrative, image to help explain the absurdity of this proposal;
I first presented this last August in my post “Anti-Gouging sounds like price controls to me“. This chart is the classic supply and demand curve. The two lines intersect at point B, the point at which the amount demanded is the same as the amount supplied. If we were to lower the maximum price allowed, the demand of course would go up, yet at the same time the seller is less willing to offer as much product at that lower price. As an article on price control from The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics offers,”When the U.S. government set maximum prices for gasoline in 1973 and 1979, dealers sold gas on a first-come-first-served basis, and drivers got a little taste of what life was like for people in the Soviet Union: they had to wait in long lines to buy gas. The true price of gas, which included both the cash paid and the time spent waiting in line, was often higher than if prices were not controlled at all.” Short term, I don’t have the answer for the current problems we are facing. I do know that oil has limited supply at a given price. At a higher price, old wells can be reopened and deeper wells can be dug at a higher cost. I also know that not nearly enough has been done to improve the efficiency of alternative fuels, specifically, wind and solar. While Congressman Hinchey is at it, he may as well propose that President Bush repeal the law of gravity. That proposal is no more absurd than interfering with the law of supply and demand, and no more chaotic in whatever the results.
Joe
May 23
The May 2 Issue of The Week magazine had an interesting article titled “The Global Food Crisis“. While I held the belief that the move to bio fuels was the major cause of the recent rise in food prices, this article gave me a better view of the big picture. While bio fuel demand is one of the causes, six years of drought in Australia, flooding in Argentina and other weather related events added to the crisis. What I missed completely was the shift in diet within China. The average Chinese person now consumes 110 pounds of meat per year, up from 44 pounds two decades ago. It takes 10 pounds of grain to produce one pound of pork and 20 pounds of grain to produce a pound of beef, so it would seem that the rise of the Asian middle class was a major factor in the current crisis. This raises new and troubling questions. Can the world shift from being largely vegetarian to omnivore and not create its own ongoing crisis? Perhaps when we realize that bio fuels are a misguided solution to this problem will we get on with the research that will lead toward a lasting solution - the alternate energy provided by solar and wind. Enjoy the holiday weekend.
Joe
Apr 25
When I wrote about The Next Bubble two weeks ago, I didn’t mention any of the companies involved in solar power. Part of my reason for that is I am not really a stock picker, and randomly suggesting companies in the industry would do my readers no justice. Last week I saw an episode of Fast Money on CNBC which brought to my attention that an ETF was introduced which “tracks solar and clean energy stocks.” It is the Clayton/MAC Global Solar Index, and trades on the NYSE under the ticker symbol TAN.
The top 5 fund holdings are:
First Solar - 8.77 %
Renewable Energy Corp - 7.45 %
Q-Cells - 6.44 %
Suntech Power Holdings - 6.19 %
JA Solar Holdings - 5.25 %
I am not recommending or discouraging purchase of this ETF, but it is a good alternative to trying to pick individual stocks when you believe a particular industry is ripe for appreciation.
Joe
Apr 18
In the scramble for solar related plays on words, Barron’s beat me to this one. They used it in the index of this week’s issue to reference their article on Applied Materials efforts in this market (solar power).
The pricing and discussion of cost of solar power can be a bit confusing. The typical benchmark used is dollars per KW. Currently, there are systems priced at $4.75/W or $4750/kW. (But this is for the Solar Panel only, the installed system will cost nearly twice this or about $9500. Now, for this to make sense, you need to ask how much power this really is. A 1KW system will produce about 1800 KWh/yr in Southern California. If 1 kWh costs about 20 cents, this is $360 worth of power, and a return of 3.8%/yr. Now, this isn’t great, admittedly, but as I’ve discussed prior, even with modest cost improvements, that number (the return on investment) will rise over time, and soon be a compelling alternative to buying off the grid. A site called solarbuzz offers much data on the progress of solar technology.
Joe
Apr 11
Some time ago, I read a book titled “Pop!: Why Bubbles Are Great For The Economy
Joe
Apr 04
A few weeks back, in the March 7 issue of The Week, I read an article titled “For energy, here comes the sun.” At first glance, it was good to see that I’m not the only one so enthusiastic, nor the only author of bad puns, having titled my first solar story “here comes the sun” back in October. I was happy to discover the article was about futurist Ray Kurzweil’s prediction that he is “confident that we are not that far away from a tipping point (my choice of words as well) where energy from solar will be [economically] competitive with fossil fuels. The longer story appeared on LifeScience.com and was titled, “Solar Power to Rule in 20 Years, Futurists Say“. Kurzweil makes reference to advances in solar power being similar to that of computer technology, but as one of my regular readers Augustine pointed out to me,”Integrated circuits fall in price because Moore said that it would be increasingly possible to shrink transistor sizes, therefore allowing to increase their number per area. And given that the cost of manufacturing integrated circuits relies heavily on the area, the more transistors per area, the cheaper the integrated circuit. Photo-voltaic cells are not made up by Silicon transistors, but by a Silicon film deposited on a surface. Therefore, its area cannot be reduced and its cost is not subject to Moore’s law.” This is true, and resets my expectations a bit. I’m still optimistic that 4 cent/KWH solar isn’t too far away.
Joe
