Andrew Ling

The State of the Thin-Film Photovoltaic Industry

Nothing much has changed regarding the tellurium prices, hence not much change in my opinion of vnp.to I own shares mainly to offset risk of higher tellurium prices to FSLR. Announcements of new plants would be the best possible news for both FSLR and VNP. It would lead to higher te prices in the short run while also putting to rest speculation that FSLR can't procure enough te in the long run.

My Top 5 Alternative Energy Stocks - and 10 Honorable Mentions

Eck, I've been trying to find a way to ship my Elise to Europe for the 3 months I'll be spending there. When I was there last year I drove my 60 horsepower rental Nissan Micra on the Autobahn flooring it for hours at a time. Unfortunately few people know the details and I didn't want to spend my vacation dealing with foreign bureaucrats. They charge a 20% tax to import the car but I figured I could sell it there to recover it there due to the favorable exchange rate and buy a new one when I got back.

I also got in and out of SOLF for a small profit last year before it had a huge collapse. I decided only to trade stocks I don't mind holding for long periods of time from now on. I'm still practicing my trading as it only accounts for about 5% of my position even though I make about 20 trades a month. My main trading principle is the change in the change in stock price. In other words when a stock accelerates on the way up it's commonly referred to as a break out and a buy indicator. Similarly when a stock sells off but the pace of the selloff slows to a stop it's also a buy indicator. This has been a great day trade with FSLR whenever the stock opens down on low volume. It will usually decrease it's downwards slope and then reverse itself at midday rallying back close to the open price by close. This doesn't work on high volume trading days since any resistance and support levels can be easily broken on volume.

My Top 5 Alternative Energy Stocks - and 10 Honorable Mentions

Tommy C, carbon fiber is indeed light but the cheapest car made out of carbon fiber is actually the electric Tesla Roadster at $100K. It's a long way off from mass market appeal. Automakers will have to walk before they can run. They are still using mostly steel in their chassis which should be replaced with Aluminum. My Lotus Elise does 0-60 in 4.8 secs and gets 30 MPG thanks to it's 150 pound aluminum chassis and lightweight plastic body panels. I'm still amazed that Porche and other sports car makers still make their chassis out of steel.

My Top 5 Alternative Energy Stocks - and 10 Honorable Mentions

Slider the difference between the 70s and now was that the 70s was an artificial opec shortage and the peak was in US production. Current prices have nothing to do with opec. They are due to a peak in world production. Unless you plan on discovering life and hence oil on Mars peaking in world production is a problem several orders of magnitudes greater than peaking US production. There is no real solution within 20 years although anything that helps compensate for energy shortfalls will benefit.

My Top 5 Alternative Energy Stocks - and 10 Honorable Mentions

sirfisup, when I drive to the Akeena Solar I can see obvious differences between the modules offered by different manufacturers. When I was in Europe I saw no differences between the GE, Vestas, or any other wind turbine. The only way to cut costs in wind is to make them even bigger, and 1MW turbines are already huge. It's a similar story with solar thermal. Although wind and solar thermal are about half the price per kwh of PV currently, they are mechanically based technologies that have existed for centuries with very little innovation occuring. This is why 2030 forecasts have PV accounting for the lions share of new electricity generation as well as a large chunk of total capacity.

My Top 5 Alternative Energy Stocks - and 10 Honorable Mentions

I try to stay away from small caps under $500 mil or so. Over the years I've seen numerous promise the moon and fail to deliver. I'm beginning to suspect some of these managements may not even believe they can achieve the targets they set. Many are just pumping their stocks. A revolutionary technology needs to be combined with credible management. That's why Tesla Motors is my most anticipated IPO. Although they're also missing production goals, their CEO Elon Musk is proven as the billionaire founder of paypal.

My Top 5 Alternative Energy Stocks - and 10 Honorable Mentions

I've owned STP in the past as my "value" play simply because I've been uncomfortable at times having all my holdings in FSLR. However, AMAT is my new limited downside play and I see no reason to buy STP over AMAT. With 2 billion in annual income AMAT is the real potential economy of scale. The $1.9 Billion Best Solar order alone would leapfrog best solar over STP. The slew of low priced pv coming online is very bad news for any company still trying to expand economies of scale with a potentially inferior technology. STP realizes this and is also a customer of AMAT. When you think about AMAT's potential it's comparable to all the other solar stocks combined. Since they're turning over equipment quickly they don't have to raise as much money as STP or Best Solar.

My Top 5 Alternative Energy Stocks - and 10 Honorable Mentions

GE is currently lacking an LED presence. That's what led to rumors they may make an offer for Cree. I wouldn't worry about GE. The same thing could've been said about all these solar "startups" 10 years ago. But GE has been unbelievably slow to the solar game. Competition is always fierce in the early stages of hypergrowth but generally all the stocks involved appreciate for at least a few years until the market sorts out the winners from the losers.

My Top 5 Alternative Energy Stocks - and 10 Honorable Mentions

Wind farms are great but the problem with wind power stocks is that it's a commoditized business. I used to own Zoltek (ZOLT) as a wind power play since they have a large share of the carbon fiber market, but the company is obviously mismanaged. Notice how I left all the Chinese solar stocks off the list. All of the companies I focus on have disruptive technology.

The State of the Thin-Film Photovoltaic Industry

Interesting carbon credit are only $24/ton. To put that in perspective a Prius saves about 1 ton/year. For the carbon credit trading system to work they should trade about 10 times higher. What a cutting edge speculative investment!

The State of the Thin-Film Photovoltaic Industry

Here are quotes from a large european exchange. Those are the rates you should use for comparison since it accounts for the majority of the solar market. US prices are generally slightly lower than the lowest euro rates

www.eex.com/en/

The State of the Thin-Film Photovoltaic Industry

Steve that is not quite right. Check out solarbuzz's method for calculating cost/kwh you guys. $5/watt installed costs about 21 cents/kwh, so $3/watt installed would be 12.5 cents/kwh. Under $2.50/watt installed is the magic number.

The State of the Thin-Film Photovoltaic Industry

Dr Sarangi, I don't think any of the players have the capital to focus on both technologies right now. Look at the solar cash cow, STP, and their venture into thin-film which I believe is a mistake. It unlikely to have much effect on sales since customers will simply choose one or the other not both. It's too early at this phase to try to build a solar conglomerate unless the likes of GE or BP decide to invest tens of billions. Each company needs to focus all their resources towards maximizing the viability of a single product.

The most astonishing thing about FSLR to date has been their manufacturing prowess which often overlooked but cannot be overstated. Less than 1 year ago their lines were rated at 25MW/year. They are already up to 44MW/line which greatly reduces costs and increases revenues. As they were already running 24/7 on 4 shifts/day to achieve 25MW/year/line the gains were obviously major leaps forward. I suspect one reason they haven't announced 4 new plants yet is because they're still trying to tweak out more production from their old ones.

The State of the Thin-Film Photovoltaic Industry

Zawy, you're talking about the fuel costs which as we know is 0 with solar. The cheapest a nuclear plant has ever been built for is $2 billion. Exelon claims they can build one for $1 billion but that's just their claim. I've read coal capex is $1/watt though I dont know how accurate that is.

The State of the Thin-Film Photovoltaic Industry

Zawy, I consider ASTI one of those interesting companies worth following but to early to buy, much like ALTI. With $1 million in annual revenues it's simply too early to buy. There's nothing wrong with waiting for it to go up five or tenfold before jumping in. A poker analogy would be like having AK before the flop with many of these small caps but having Aces and Kings on a safe board at the river with a large cap name like FSLR. The majority of the time these companies are dead money until they have an obvious path to profitability. ASTI's panels demonstrate PV's potential but it's a huge crossover to go from NASA applications to industrial usage.

Colin, CSP may be in all the headlines right now with all the huge several hundred megawatt panels, but much like wind the technology has been around so long that the best way for them to reduce costs is simply by increasing system size. I don't think smaller distributed systems are the way to go. CSP may have low materials costs but there are also maintenance costs which would increase with smaller systems. Besides that, you lose power output/acre when building outside the Arizona and Nevada deserts. I've looked at the major alternatives to PV but they all cost at least $2.00-$2.50/watt, including nuclear. At that price there's presently no urgency for CSP as it's not quite at grid parity. However, I'm an adamant peak oil theorist and if Oil were to break above $200 in the next few years, which has been my #1 wildcard reason for investing in FSLR (best return on energy investment among the major players), wind, CSP, EVs, nuclear, and coal would be the only real ways to make up the slack. Attention would shift away from the "future" in PV towards today.

I'm not an expert in CSP but I can't imagine one of them coming through with a breakthrough proprietary technology. So if they did IPO I wouldn't be particularly interested. Colin, do you have any info on the installed costs for distributed CSP?

I've also owned STP, SPWR, CREE, CCJ, and ZOLT over the last two years but in the end I always sell them off when their stocks start behaving improperly e.g. weak relative strength. I would still consider buying SPWR if polysilicon prices drop drastically, CREE if LED prices drop drastically, and CCJ or FXI if I can't find anything more attractive to buy.

What I'd really like to invest in is an Electric Vehicle company like Tesla that can challenge the major automakers. I'm surprised there aren't major EV players out of China or India dominating the market already. Unfortunately they're losing their window of opportunity as the GM Volt and next-gen Prius will come out in a couple years.