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1. Solar Rally — How Long This Time?
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2. Orient Green Power Picks up $55 Million
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3. Ask Nature: Using Biomimicry to Solve Design Problems
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4. Daily Sprout
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5. Mailman Cuts Out Junk Mail, You Can Too!
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6. Chinese Car Maker SAIC to Develop Electric Cars
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7. IBM Snags More Utilities for Smart Grid Tech
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8. Batteries In the Works To Prop Up the Power Grid
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9. Demand for Tata Motors Slumps, Nano Stays in Neutral
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10. Science Grads Swap Finance Jobs for Cleantech
Solar Rally — How Long This Time?
Kevin Kelleher - Big Green
For the past few months, stocks of solar-energy companies have been following the movements of the broader market, only with amplified volatility. So it comes as no surprise that, with stock indexes in general rising for the fourth straight trading day, solar stocks are up big.
In mid-day trading, Solarfun is up 21 percent at $5.01, Trina Solar is 16 percent higher at $8.85. SunPower is trading up 11 percent at $33.79, Evergreen Solar is up 17 percent at $2.79 and bellwether First Solar had risen 6 percent to $124.76.
What’s going on? Adding to a sense that the heavy, across-the-board selling had eased up and offered investors a chance to buy stocks at beaten-down prices was an encouraging earnings report from Yingli Green Energy, one of the biggest solar stars back in the halcyon days of 2007.
While Yingli reported a 16 percent drop in its third-quarter profit (tied to currency losses and higher operating costs), it held onto its estimate of revenue this year between $1.05 billion and $1.11 billion. The higher figure would represent a doubling of revenue this year.
Yingli also announced that it’s buying Cyber Power, a China-based company with a subsidiary producing polysilicon, for a price between $70 million and $80 million. Overall, the company said things aren’t getting worse than it had previously thought, and these days that’s what passes for good news.
Yingli was up 4 percent at $4.67 during trading Wednesday. Since last Thursday’s close, the stock has risen 82 percent. Other stocks have seen similar surges — SunPower is up 64 percent this week, helped in good part by a research note from Raymond James, which argued its strong execution warrants a “strong buy” rating.
“SunPower’s track record for successfully developing and executing some of the world’s largest photovoltaic projects gives it a major edge when competing for utility contracts.”
Despite the challenges facing the solar industry, the Raymond James analyst, Pavel Molchanov, found reason for optimism in the sector.
“We take this opportunity to highlight a bright spot against the tough backdrop: one of the more durable sources of photovoltaic demand — the U.S. utility market.”
As encouraging as that sounds longer term, it’s likely the broad selling pressure will resume in early December (a big month for hedge fund redemptions and tax-related selling), which could erase many of the big gains achieved this week.
Orient Green Power Picks up $55 Million
David Ehrlich - Energy
India’s Orient Green Power, a renewable energy developer, has raised $55 million in a second round of funding (hat tip PE Hub). The investment was led by Olympus Capital Holdings Asia, which put $35 million into the round. Return backers Shriram EPC and Bessemer Venture Partners invested $10 million each in Orient Green.
Shriram, a provider of engineering and construction services for renewable energy, water and wastewater projects, said in a statement that Orient Green now has access to $75 million in equity with this latest round of funding. Orient Green will use the cash to expand its renewable holdings, including setting up and acquiring biomass, cogeneration, wind, small hydro and biogas projects.
Another Indian cleantech firm got a boost earlier this month, when Azure Power raised an undisclosed amount of funding for its solar power projects. Helion Venture Partners and Foundation Capital led the Series A round. Azure said it has a number of grid-connected and off-grid sites under development across several Indian states.
Orient Green currently operates 70 megawatts (MW) of biomass and wind power, but it’s aiming for 500 MW of renewables within the next five years. The company has two 7.5 MW biomass plants in Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan and multiple wind farms in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. Currently, it’s working on another 146 MW of hydro and biomass power.
In addition to selling power, Orient Green plans to make cash by selling Certified Emission Reduction credits under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism. According to Orient Green’s web site, the company is also looking at getting into ethanol production.
Ask Nature: Using Biomimicry to Solve Design Problems
Bridgette Steffen - Sustainable Building
The Biomimicry Institute recently teamed up with Autodesk to launch AskNature.org, an incredible source of information for the growing community of professionals researching and applying the principles of biomimicry. The solutions that animals and nature have come up with have been tried and tested for millions of years (certainly longer than humans have been designing), so why reinvent the wheel? Why not learn from nature to make our designs more efficient, elegant, and sustainable?
Daily Sprout
Josie Garthwaite - 1
Rhode Island Victory: Several big automakers tried to stop the Ocean State from adopting California’s stricter auto emissions regulations. A federal district judge ruled against them today, giving Detroit another ding and environmentalists a boon. — NYT’s Green, Inc.
Testing, Testing: GM announced that nine companies will begin on-road testing of its fourth-generation hydrogen fuel-cell car in Berlin after more than a decade in development. — Autoblog Green
Battle of the Fuels: Collapsed oil prices have softened some of the urgent arguments for clean energy. Natural gas, which is relatively cheap and and expected to stay that way, could give renewables a run for their money. — WSJ’s Environmental Capital
Weakest Link: Invented two centuries ago, batteries have slipped behind in the high-tech world. Now energy-storage industry is a hothouse for innovation. — Newsweek
Economic Climate: Global economic turmoil will test leaders’ resolve to invest in renewable energy and slow emissions at the 14th annual UN conference on climate change in Poznan, Poland next week. — Triple Pundit
Mailman Cuts Out Junk Mail, You Can Too!
Alexandra Kain - Graphics & Packaging
A former North Carolina mailman was recently fined $3,000 and ordered to do 500 hours of community service for cutting out the junk mail. For over seven years, no one on Steven Padgett’s route received a single pizza flyer, ‘Current Resident’ catalog or sweepstakes entry - now that’s something to be thankful for. Unfortunately, this mailman couldn’t put an end to the production of junk mail, leaving much of it in his backyard or garage, but you can. 100 million trees are chopped, processed, glossed and stuffed into US mailboxes every year. Fight back with one of the many opt out services below!
Chinese Car Maker SAIC to Develop Electric Cars
David Ehrlich - Automotive
The Chinese market is set to get more home-grown alternative energy vehicles, with SAIC Motor joining the list of companies that plan to work on hybrid and electric cars in the country. According to Reuters, the automaker will form a joint venture with its state-owned parent, Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp., which will invest 2 billion yuan ($293 million) to develop the low-emission vehicles.
Chinese electric car and battery maker BYD is also working on electric cars, and the company got a boost from overseas in September when investor Warren Buffett put up $230 million for a 10 percent stake. BYD is expected to start selling its electric vehicles in China next year and in Europe by 2010.
There’s no word on whether SAIC Motor plans to export its hybrid and electric vehicles, but it faces growing competition from more than just BYD for the domestic market alone. Earlier this month, Japan’s Nissan Motor said it had its own plans to pitch an electric car to Chinese consumers. The president of Nissan’s China division said the company will start selling electric cars in the country by 2012, according to Bloomberg.
But all of these upcoming electric cars will need some kind of charging infrastructure to keep them buzzing along, and while Nissan has made deals for charging networks in other countries, no plans have been released from Nissan, BYD or SAIC Motor for a network in China.
Nissan is working with electric car charging startup Better Place via the Renault-Nissan Alliance in Israel, Denmark and Australia, but has not yet made any deals with the startup for its work in China. Better Place also just made its first move in the U.S. market, announcing a deal to set up its system in California.
SAIC Motor isn’t completely new to the cleantech space. Reuters said SAIC Motor rolled out its first locally produced hybrid car in January as part of a venture with General Motors. SAIC Motor and GM teamed up in 1997 to produce Buicks and other GM-brand cars for the Chinese market. SAIC Motor is also aiming to introduce fuel-cell vehicles after 2010.
Shanghai Automotive will hold a 90 percent stake in the new hybrid and electric venture, called Shanghai Jieneng Automotive Technology, with publicly-traded SAIC Motor holding the remaining 10 percent.
IBM Snags More Utilities for Smart Grid Tech
Katie Fehrenbacher - Energy
On the heels of IBM announcing it’s working with French electric utility EDF on smart grid research, the computing giant says today that it is also working with utilities American Electric Power (AEP), and Consumers Energy to deploy and test smart grid technology.
For Consumers Energy, which has about 6.5 million customers in Michigan, IBM says it will implement advanced metering technology and a smart grid field pilot network that will start being built in 2009. For AEP, which has 5 million customers across 11 states, IBM will deploy smart grid technology for customer programs in at least three cities, and provide technology, storage devices and energy-efficiency technology. Utilities are increasingly taking the plunge and deploying smart grid technology in an attempt to both increase the efficiency of existing power plants (which in turn can help avoid adding more expensive power generation), as well as get the grid ready for the addition of clean power generation. U.S. utilities plan to add 40 gigawatts of clean energy generation by 2030 and to ensure that the grid can handle that load utilities need to implement technologies like smart meters, networking software and hardware, and energy storage and grid power.
IBM has been working in the smart grid field for years. It is a member of industry groups including GridWise Alliance, Global Intelligent Utility Network Coalition, and the Demand and Response Smart Grid Coalition (which Google also recently joined), and it has also been working with smart-grid startups like Gridpoint through its venture capital group.
Batteries In the Works To Prop Up the Power Grid
Katie Fehrenbacher - Energy
The power grid has seen little innovation in the past few decades, but lately battery companies have started to develop energy storage technologies meant to sit on the grid and help prepare the network for a buildout of renewable energy. Last week, lithium ion battery startup A123 Systems said it had installed a grid battery at a power plant owned by a utility in Southern California. This week battery company Saft and power product maker ABB say they are working on “the world's first” high-voltage lithium-ion battery for the power grid.
Saft is contributing a 5.2 kilovolt (kV) battery and ABB is developing technology to control the voltage. The technology could supposedly help grids that have a significant amount of renewable energy sources (like wind and solar) that are intermittent, i.e. aren’t on all the time and have varying states. Another lithium-ion battery developer, Altair Nanotechnologies, said recently it has also made progress with its battery storage system for power grids.
There will surely be a market for such battery technology. Stabilizing power grids that have newly added clean power is a serious concern — according to a report from The Brattle Group, the national electricity grid could need a $2 trillion investment to maintain stability from the planned additional 40 gigawatts of clean energy generation by 2030.
According to Lux Research the market for a “smart power web" will reach $65 billion by 2013. The bulk of that smart power web will be made up by energy storage technology like batteries and alternative grid power, but will also include smart-metering hardware and software, networking technologies.
Demand for Tata Motors Slumps, Nano Stays in Neutral
Josie Garthwaite - Automotive
Tata Motors, India’s largest auto manufacturer and would-be maker of the ultra-cheap Nano and the electric Indica, shut down its factory in Jamshedpur today for the second time in less than a month. Set to last five days, the closure is an attempt to keep vehicles — and losses — from piling up as a global economic recession puts the brakes on demand.
This, along with production cuts announced last month, intense local opposition to placement of the Nano manufacturing plant, and growing troubles for its parent company, Tata Group, suggests the Nano’s once bright star is on the wane. Unveiled in January to buzz that electric versions might soon follow, the car was due to launch this quarter with a price tag of just $2,500. When steel prices increased earlier this year, that began to look like a surefire loss.
The launch has been pushed back to March, but for the Nano, there is a silver lining to the financial crisis now slamming Tata: collapsed steel prices could help limit production costs, and affordable cars never look better than in the midst of recession. Of course, winning the $10 million Automotive X Prize couldn’t hurt either (Tata will enter a smaller, all-electric version of the Nano, as well as a hybrid-electric four-seat version in this year’s competition).
Better still might be the scenario forecast last week by India’s finance minister: economic growth of up to 9 percent next year, driven by increased consumer spending on houses and cars. With the Think City car making a fast comeback in Norway, the Tata will have to move quickly — and avoid Nano-style delays — with the Indica EV to keep up.
Science Grads Swap Finance Jobs for Cleantech
Celeste LeCompte - Carbon Markets
The economic downturn may be gutting the ethanol markets and souring term sheets, but here’s one silver lining: Math and science grads are turning to engineering instead of investment banking, BusinessWeek reports.
Throughout the cleantech business, we’ve heard reports that many startups are finding themselves in the following predicament: While armed with a good business plan, a good idea, and good technology, they don’t have enough staff to scale their science-based business. It’s a problem affecting companies across the board, from traditional infrastructure development to solar installation to the carbon market.
At a media briefing earlier this year, Luc Larmuseau, global director of climate change services for risk management firm DNV (Det Norske Veritas), said a lack of qualified engineering professionals at all stages, from project development to project verification, is a major hurdle to speeding greenhouse gas-reducing projects through the pipeline. Developing carbon offset projects is a complex maze of engineering, regulatory requirements, environmental science and business know-how. Verifying that the projects do what they claim is an equally taxing process, and the labor shortage is creating a logjam when it comes to getting more carbon projects online.
As students shift into technology fields from I-banking, it could be a boon for carbon markets — and other greentech startups. From the BusinessWeek article:
“Over the last few years, many students who have had innovative ideas ultimately chose to take a more risk-averse career in investment banking or consulting,” says Travis May, another Harvard undergrad who put off finishing school to relaunch StudentBusinesses.com, an online service designed to match student-founded companies with angel funding. “Now, there is less of a pull to go in a traditional route, and the upside of that is it makes startups more compelling as a career path,” May says.
An influx of smart, driven engineers could be just what the cleantech business needs. As President-elect Obama and others work to stimulate the economy with green collar jobs, it’s nice to know that the nation’s brainiacs are headed in the same direction.
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