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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

I want to call readers’ attention to 2GreenEnergy Associates Bill Paul’s report: The Top Twenty Takeover Candidates among Publicly Traded Alternative Energy Companies Headquartered in the U.S.

As I’ve mentioned, speaking with Bill Paul really is like drinking from a fire hose. I ask a question, shut up, and take notes patiently, as if I were a court stenographer. Bill wades through 75 different data streams every day of the week, and recently he’s been focusing on mergers and acquisitions – the subject of the report — looking for great volatility and the accompanying opportunity. He has a great deal of incredibly well researched material assembled here.

Where most stock brokers focused on the energy sector read about oil and gas, and a few know something about solar and wind, most of the money to be made in the coming few years in renewables will be derived from places in which very few people are looking. “New energy” is a constantly changing combination of dozens of intertwining technologies – and changes in infrastructure, e.g., smart grid, electric transportation, energy storage — as well as clean fuel sources.

Bill has really nailed this in his report. I hope you find it valuable. We weren’t able to give this one away, but there is a 100% money-back guarantee if for ANY reason you’re not completely satisfied.

We’re quite proud of our exclusive relationship with Bill. We are honored to have an exclusive arrangement whereby this incredible content is made available to a world so ravenously hungry for solid information — in a market that can be so terribly fickle and difficult to grasp.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Science

Here’s a post I wrote on carbon capture and sequestration that I put on Renewable Energy World. I note that even the sites that cover the traditional energy markets — like Energy Central – are coming down hard on the utter absurdity of clean coal. Martin Rosenburg, the main voice there, writes very well and clearly, and his recent piece does a good job in laying out the issues surrounding clean coal in a few short paragraphs, with solid stats, nailing down the extreme volumes of gas, lengths of new pipelines, and extreme costs associated with the endeavor.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Solar Thermal

The other day, I wrote a short post on Renewable Energy World extolling the virtues of concentrated solar power, and predicting that CSP would someday (probably in my grandchildren’s lifetimes) dominate the landscape of world energy production. Almost immediately, someone asked me why I held that belief, and I realized that I should have provided a bit of my reasoning. In brief, here it is:

1) The ultimate winner in energy will be safe, scalable, reliable, and inexpensive. This kills most energy technologies more or less immediately. Fossil fuels aren’t scalable, nuclear is neither safe nor inexpensive, etc.  And a great number of green energy technologies, e.g., run-of-river-hydro, don’t scale well.

2) With a few exceptions, the sun’s radiation is the ultimate source of all energy on Earth. Thus, the most obvious line of investigation for energy policy is determining the most direct way to convert the warmth of the sun into useful energy.

3) Most of the dozens of renewable technologies attempt to capitalize on this fact. The sun makes the wind blow, the rivers run, and builds the chemical bonds that are broken down when we convert complex organic molecules back into simpler ones (e.g., burning wood in our fireplaces, explode gasoline in our cars, or gasify waste in processing plants). But the most direct, efficient way to harness the sun’s energy is transferring those photons as directly as possible into electricity. This leaves us with solar photovoltaics and CSP.

4) It could be argued that PV is even more direct than CSP. And, if it weren’t for the problems in building large volumes of semiconductors for PV, I believe it would have won. But PV is ultimately doomed to significant manufacturing issues and materials shortages that, I believe, will limit scalability.

5) CSP, by contrast, uses low-cost and abundant materials, which can be deployed in areas that are relatively unimportant to plant and animal habitat (deserts). Of course, all energy-related technologies — even the dozens of breakthroughs in extracting coal, oil, and natural gas — are improving day by day. But CSP is still in its infancy. The gains in efficiency, the way in which solar thermal heat is stored to produce reliable baseload power, and the way in which that energy is effectively transmitted via high-voltage direct current to population centers — is improving every day.

I know there are people who disagree, but CSP is my pick for the late 21st Century. I only hope we still have a planet that supports life by that point.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

PhotobucketI wrote a blog post on “Energy Central” last week on clean coal, referring to it as an “oxymoron,” and a “seedy PR ploy.” And a few moments after the post went up, some guy told me, “take your silly invective elsewhere.”

Ouch, pal!

But I note that many of those who know ten times more about this than I have reached the same conclusion I did. In particular, I read an excerpt from SRI Consulting’s (SRIC) techno-economic report Advanced Carbon Capture that examines in detail three post combustion scrubbing technologies: conventional monoethanolamine (MEA), advanced amine, and chilled ammonia. They note that all three of these processes have technical and economic issues that must be overcome before they can be implemented at scale.

“On a levelized cost basis with 90% CO2 capture and compression, MEA scrubbing adds 4.5¢/KWh, while the advanced amine and chilled ammonia processes each add 4.1¢/KWh to the cost of power generation.” Noted author Michael Arné at SRIC commented, “The scale of the process equipment needed for power plant applications is remarkable. All three processes covered in this report require Gulliver-like equipment that will have its own challenges such as proper liquid distribution, pressure drop, and structural issues in the construction of such large equipment items. For example, for a plant producing 550 MW net power output, each of the processes analyzed will require two absorbers roughly 40 feet in diameter by 100 feet tall.”

I honestly don’t think my “invective” was all that “silly.”

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

PhotobucketMy association with Bill Paul has provided me with a crash course in what’s happening behind the scenes in the world of alternative energy finance and investment. Yet it’s not hard to see what makes all this so difficult for the average investor: the sheer number of variables; it’s a true moving target. One set of such variables, of course, is the price of competitors’ products – determined, as they are, by a number of different forces – all out of our control: wars, storms, natural disasters, unforeseeable discoveries, decisions to limit or expand oil production, and so forth. Another is the subject of renewables itself – a twisted knot of new technologies, efficiency breakthroughs, discontinuous cost reductions, government subsidies and incentives, and back-office political deal-making.

I was delighted with the turnout at Tuesday’s webinar, and with the great number of the favorable comments we received. This shows me that a large number of people out there find this subject as vitally important as we do here. We’ll try to keep up a regular schedule.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Politics

PhotobucketWhen I was back East earlier in the week, I had the opportunity to speak with Bill Paul on a great number of interesting topics related to our renewable energy field. I happened to mention that the public attitude that surrounds global climate change is a moving target, and I speculated that I knew the essential cause: people tend to react more violently to immediate, close-to-home crises (e.g., their personal financial scene) than they do to those that are more distant — either in space (foreign wars) or in time (global climate change). “Yes,” Bill agreed, “No one has the bandwidth to watch a slow-motion train wreck.” What a good metaphor that is.

I’m reminded of my interview with the man generally credited with the discover of global warming in the early 1970s, Dr. V. Ramanathan, now teaching and conducting ongoing atmospheric research at the Scripps Institution. I asked if he agreed that fewer people believed in his theory now than two or three years ago. “Oh yes,” he replied. “People have a limited amount of space in their heads for crises; they can only hold so many terrifying ideas in place at one time.”

A related idea that I support is one I call “crisis fatigue.” I liken it to the phenomenon in which the nerve cells in our nostrils that process smell soon “tire” of a certain odor stimulus and fail to respond to it completely after a minute or two. It seems that the public — at least in the US — has become numb to the enormity of the threat posed by global climate change.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

I want to thank everyone who attended Tuesday’s webinar with Bill Paul. In his characteristically humble manner, Bill asked me as we were leaving the room if he handled himself well with the questions from the audience and me. Yes, Bill, you were terrific. I apologize, however, for the technical glitches. We’re scheduling another webinar soon, and I promise to have addressed the noise issues and other annoyances.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

It’s amazing how coincidences pile up around us. I’m going into the Alternative Energy Investing webinar with Bill Paul wondering what I should ask him about, and I happen to be looking at yesterday’s Wall Street Journal with its huge and utterly glowing report on shale gas. This got me thinking:

I wonder how objective these people are? Am I just cynical, or do I perceive that there is a reason behind virtually every word in that paper? All I really learn from articles like this is that someone wants me to believe shale gas is a huge game-charger in the energy industry. Perhaps I’m being unfair. Let’s ask Bill and get his opinions.

But aren’t these extraction techniques fantastically unsound ecologically? And does shale gas impact anyone outside the US?

Hope you’ll join us.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Electric Vehicles

Here’s another post on the EV adoption curve that I put on Renewable Energy World in which I claim that range anxiety will have a smaller-than-predicted effect on EV sales.

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by Craig ShieldsPosted on Posted in Renewables - Business

I’m headed for New York later today for a series of meetings — some with people frequently mentioned here.  I’ll be having dinner Monday night on the Upper West Side with Rona Fried, whose SustainableBusiness.com has formed a vibrant partnership with 2GreenEnergy to promote and deliver consulting services.  From there, it’s across the Hudson for Tuesday’s webinar with financial analyst Bill Paul.  Finally, it’s a drive to Boston for a day packed with talks with heavy-hitters in solar.

I’ll give your regards to Broadway.

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