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1. LDK Shares Heat Up After Hours on Bright Earnings
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2. Duke and AEP to Power Up $1B for Transmission Lines
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3. U.S. Cities Join Carbon Disclosure Project
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4. Gordon Murray to Design New Green(ish) Supercar
LDK Shares Heat Up After Hours on Bright Earnings
Katie Fehrenbacher - Big Green
Solar stocks haven’t caught a break in recent weeks, depressed by fears of an uncertain investment tax credit, a cut in Spanish subsidies and an overall economic slump. But here’s an exception: Chinese solar wafer maker LDK reported earnings on Monday above expectations and saw its shares jump almost 20 percent in after hours trading.
For the second quarter ended June 30 2008 LDK reported revenues of $441.7 million, up almost 350 percent from the second quarter of 2007 when the company reported $99.1 million. Net income was equally impressive — the company reported $149.5 million, or $1.29 per diluted ADS. As Marketwatch points out analysts were expecting earnings of 40 cents an ADS on revenue of $287 million. Chairman and CEO Xiaofeng Peng said in the release that the strong quarter resulted from the fact that expansion of the company’s wafer capacity exceeded expectations.
For the third quarter of this year LDK had more good news to share — the company said it is expecting revenues in the range of $486 million to $496 million; full year revenue is projected to be in the range of $1.65 billion to $1.75 billion. If you remember, LDK was also in the news last week, but with a decidedly more negative effect. GT Solar can thank LDK for helping the crash and burn of its IPO, after LDK said it had ditched GT Solar for a competitor.
Duke and AEP to Power Up $1B for Transmission Lines
Craig Rubens - Big Green
The proposed project, called Pioneer Transmission, would run 240 miles of extra-high-voltage 765-kilovolt (kV) transmission lines from Duke Energy's Greentown Station (near Kokomo, Ind.) to AEP's Rockport Station (east of Evansville, Ind.).
The project, which won’t be completed before 2014, is estimated to cost about $1 billion. The utilities hope to pass the cost of this sizable infrastructure project along to their customers across over a dozen states, which will require regulatory approval from the local overseeing body, the Midwestern Independent System Operator and PJM Interconnection. The joint venture says it will also seek approval from the Federal Energy and Regulatory Commission to operate as a transmission utility in Indiana. Electricity customers generally back the idea of green power, but depending on how much rates will rise, this could cause some customer alarm.
U.S. Cities Join Carbon Disclosure Project
Craig Rubens - Policy
What gets measured gets managed, and for too long the processes that emit carbon into the atmosphere have gone unmanaged. The Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a nonprofit consortium of some 385 global institutional investors with a combined asset base of more than $57 trillion, is trying to change that. The CDP said yesterday that 21 American cities have agreed to report their greenhouse gas emissions and other climate change-relevant data through the project’s transparent tracking system.
The cities, including New York, Denver, Las Vegas, Saint Paul and Portland, will report the carbon emissions of all activities under their budgetary oversight, including emergency services, municipal buildings and waste management. The cities will use ICLEI's (formerly the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives) Local Government Operations Protocol and software tools to track and profile the information, which will be published in the first CDP Cities Report and ICLEI Local Action Network Report in January 2009.
Founded in 2000, the CPD has big goals and big name signatories. As of 2008, the CPD had gotten 3,000 of the world’s largest companies to respond to its carbon risks and opportunities questionnaire, and it hopes to get all S&P 500 companies to participate. Its web site represents the largest repository of corporate greenhouse gas emissions data in the world, according to the group. Much of the information is made publicly available, allowing policymakers to see the carbon costs of business to inform the regulatory process.
But it’s also good for private sector players to track the carbon risks associated with their investments. Merrill Lynch, who helps fund the CPD, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, AIG Investments, Barclays and HSBC are all “signatory investors” in the CPD, have access to information not publicly available. These huge investors are already dealing with carbon regulation in the European market and expect America will soon follow suit; when that happens, they’ll need baseline info on their existing investments to start gauging carbon-related risk. Many of these companies are also tracking carbon credits and cleantech indices.
Gordon Murray to Design New Green(ish) Supercar
Tony Borroz - Startups
Gordon Murray, famous for knocking the Formula One racing world on its collective ear on more than one occasion (with such notable designs as the Brabham F1 fan car and McLaren's almost all conquering MP4/4) has been turning his fertile imagination towards personal transportation of a greener, if no less fun, stripe. After peaking interest with his highly secretive compact T25 City Car earlier this year, Murray is supposedly planning to use the same manufacturing and construction methods for an as-yet unnamed supercar that will also feature a heavy green slant.
According to Autocar UK Murray wants to build a T25 inspired supercar that will be compact, lightweight and powered by a high-output, small-capacity engine, combining strong performance with low CO2 emissions. The "compact and lightweight" part is easy to understand, since those were two of the basic parts of a performance car design since day one. But what is particularly noticeable is the "powered by a high-output, small-capacity engine, combining strong performance with low CO2 emissions" part. This represents the way forward for performance cars of a greener future.
The standard practice for performance cars is to make the car as small as practical and stuff the biggest engine you can find into the engine bay. Most top of the line offerings from companies such as Ferrari and Aston Martin and Bugatti feature engines in the 6-liter range. There's no hard data from Murray yet on engine size for the T25, but keep this in mind: in the mid-80s, Honda was making 1.5 liter racing engines that cranked out well in excess of 1000 horse power (coincidentally enough, these Honda engines sat in Gordon Murray designed McLaren chassis); big power from small engines is imminently feasible.
Lowering CO2 emissions is the next big hurdle facing European car manufacturers, with more stringent standards that will phase in over the next decade. For Murray to get a jump on this aspect of performance car design is a very positive sign.
Although still in the very early stages of design and development, Gordon Murray Design is supposedly considering putting the supercar into production themselves. And Gordon tells Autocar UK: "We wouldn't necessarily sell on the supercar for someone else to make."
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