Piggybank

Solar Companies Discuss Possible Effects of the Downturn on Their Industry

good stuff. Solar is part of the sollution to this mess. Decrease oil dependency, make the economy more effeciant, increase margins of all industry's with cheaper electricity, create jobs, and help the ecology. The subsidies are in place, the quarter results and growth of solar company's remain strong. there has been no indication yet that this industry is in any way affeced, while we see about every other industry be affected indeed.

The maket has so far overreacted with arbitrary selling off everything. Sure solar multipliers were high, but it is a strong growth sector too. the raw numbers remain great, rising sales, rising profit, expanding industry. Let the industry post another 2 quarters of great numbers on earnings during this crisis and were off for decades. people will weel unhappy should they not have taken the opportunity to buy at these cheap levels if this scenario continues to fold out so positivly.

And why not? Solar is not a big industry. With all it's current cappacity it hardly manages to provide more than 0.3% of world needed electricity. All in all, i think this industry is still so small and yet so promising that it is quite easy to dodge the ill effects of this credit crisis. And afterall, the only concern for solar company's atm is that this crisis might inpact it's superb growth, not it's current revenue. Other company's are facing real decline in demand, solar is not even feeling decline in a demand that is far higher than the sector's output, to be only concerned about how fast they could still grow, thats one heck of a luxury at this moment.

Goldman Turns Cautious on Solar Sector

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Molnar Tuesday cut his rating on First Solar (FSLR) to a Conviction Sell from Buy, slashing his price target to $103 from $365.
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Seriously, if Mister Molnar is just going to pull prices on the fly from his ass, then he can aswell make it a nice round number. 103$? Why not just a 100$? I'd like to see their calculations scheets that first turn ip with 365$ and a few month's later with 103$.

Anyway, if you listened to Molnar when FSLR was at 315$ not that long ago, then you'd be seriously screwed over with this new target. Maybe GS should start to predict the fluctuations months into the future, like FSLR will first go to 365$ and then to 103$ and then to 25.689$ and 24 cents and then back to 5$.

Solar and Cash: The Big Boys Have an Answer - Do You?

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It would take a field of solar panels or wind turbines the size of a city, to power a city of the same size.
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You don't need wind turbine's the size of the city itself lol. My hometown in Europe has 30.000 souls and is currently almost fully supplied of energy by 9 windmills at the nothern fringe of the city near the industrial zone. ... thats just 9 (2MW) turbine's ... you cant even see them from the other side of the town. :p

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What happens at night? Or when the wind isn't blowing? You're telling me that you can store the extra energy accumulated during the day to keep our city powered at night??
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Some yes, the rest you get from other sources, and the excess you get on good wind days goes to other places. Anyway, its not because the wid blows less at one site that it does so on an other side to. We have windmills al over Europe and there is no problem with exporting for ex electricity from Denmark to france or vice versa.

The Danish have 20% of their energy from wind, and its still growing. And its not like they have regular power outages, au contraire, i think that appens less in Denmark than in other country's.

Anyway, there are enough engineers to provide a sollution for all youre concerns. It's not that i know all the methods on how they resolve these issues, though i doubt you have technical expertise in these fields youreself, no pun intended, just that i doubt that what you put forward are really difficult concerns.

A Look at Four Polysilicon-Based PV Manufacturers' Funding

if anything has been proven on this site it is the fact that youre average investor and commenter reading this site aint naive and stupid neither. We have the right to criticize these article's, and many a analyst article has clearly been found to light and absurd for us to believe.

There is some point towards attacking the contributor to, well atleast if he's comming from some bank that was instrumental in providing us the current crisis that has proven to be an unnesecary fly in the ointment to us alt energy investors, we havn't asked for this crisis, but the banks behidn the crisis are downgrading stocks now because of the crisis, thats just to ironic.

And they can clearly affect stock prices and make money on their own by it. Stocks move quite often on analysts down or upgrade's, and they can build their position before the move happens..

Polysilicon-Based PV Manufacturers: Clarifying the Financial Issues

Iirc Rec had only delays in their Project at Moses lake, partly due to weather circumstances. (expanded?) Production should now start at the end of 2008 instead of 3rd quarter and the project would cost about 800 million dollar instead of 660. They have another large silicon plant in Butte, and multiple other projects in the make further down the production line to, a particulary large one in Singapore.

Polysilicon-Based PV Manufacturers: Clarifying the Financial Issues

Well then Rec has another advantage that it's leading silane production. It will survive.

Rec is also a very good source for insights into the industry, always liked their presentation material, and i give it more credit than youre average analyst to.

Polysilicon-Based PV Manufacturers: Clarifying the Financial Issues

Solar overproduced?

Solar power now generates something like 0.2% of total energy need. It's not the market is saturated, not by far. In fact if Solar holds the potential that people perceive it to have, that is the potential to provide something like 30% or more of our energy need within a few decade's , an energy need to probably will have substantially increased too, then from that presumption we can only conclude that the industry is still in it's baby shoes production wise.

Maybe what you wanna point out is that we have to much capacity to soon, that demand won't be high enough at the current cost effeciancy of solar. I think that would be a very speculative presumption, if the energy market would shift only a tiny bit more towards solar then it could already have profound effects since solar is so small. It's very difficult at this moment to speculate on this, the energy market is changing very rapidly at this moment due to price changes in energy commodity's. There are lots of factors that can affect demand of solar energy in a relative short time span. There is this ellection comming up in the USA for one and it could have quite a profound effect depending of who wins.Thats just an example. there is just so much that can happen that might render youre numbers useless.

Polysilicon-Based PV Manufacturers: Clarifying the Financial Issues

Well my largest solar position is in REC, or renewable energy corperation. Also down quite a bit like other solars, but anyway:

Rec, as a few other solar company's, is a fully verticly intigrated solar company, meaning they do everything from producing polysilicon to fabricating wafers and cells and eventually also selling and installing the panels itselfs. Rec is one of the leading solar company's and it is the most profitable in the whole solar space, quite probably due to this vertical intigration.

Isn't it so that verticly intigrated company's are insulated from the problems you adress? I can mention a few more verticly integrated solar company's. As to the future of this company, i'm pretty sure it will susrvive, it did survive the collapse of the first solar hausse, it was around already by that time to. i think it's easily the oldest pure play solar company so far right now.

Being verticly integrated and having a large profit margin should be an indicator that the company has a better chance to survive?

The 'Problem' With Solar Companies is Not Really a Problem

I gues they just had to find a reason for their downgrade. It would actually be quite funny if the market wasn't dropping like a stone right now.

But i think we already established the fact as investors that much of the oppinions we get from these banks are very superficial and usually just crap.

Their motivations arn't hard to read neither. If all thing's move so fast on upgrades or downgrades, then afcourse it's an easy for these banks to manipulate their positions in their advantage, be it holding or shorting. And we all know they need money very very badly. Manipulating a market then that is very volatile can afcourse provide a lot of potential for money maing then, plenty of possible down- and upside potential.

I live in Europe to, and i have my skepticism to when they tend to touch European subsidies. I am however glad that Europe is years ahead in the market and that our policy makers have shown some vision about alt energy that they arn't likely to drop that fast. Alt energy is a growing sector in Europe, one that provides a lot of income and employment, it's enough incentive IMo for our politicians to continue their support.

And it doesn't always have to be subsidies neither. One particular German city for ex. is now forcing people by law to install solar panels on every new build house from now on. It is expected that by 2010 this will be coman law all over germany, if not also in many other EU country's.

The 'Problem' With Solar Companies is Not Really a Problem

Well said. The analysts made me laugh to. Way to state the obvious.

I don't give a shit about what they say neither.

Solar Stocks Feeling the Heat

Meh it doesn't matter all to much. At the current state Solar energy is a niche, it is that small that demand easily far outstrips supply for years to come at this moment. Most established solar company's have very deep backlog's, and even during this crisis the backlog's only appear to increase. Solar energy is like something of 0.2% of our total world energy supply, probably not even that, and they have been installing for a few years.

There only needs to be a tiny shift towards solar energy use on global scale and already it would mean enourmous demand difference for the solar sector and even for that tiny market share many of these company's are already very financially sound, much better than most banks these days that are filled with gifted analysts.

And the shift will come quite soon enough. Electricity prices should be youre indicator to follow. It could be more determinal that subsidy's, because the more electricity prices rise, the faster solar panels pay themself back. And solar power has a hughe advantage, it empowers people to produce their own energy, the more electricity prices rise the more people and company's that will want to be specificly energy independant.

But i think that if electricity prices begin to soar, then many major company's will feel compelled to invest heavily in solar panels and produce their own energy. Not only because it would greatly improve the net income of these company's but also their competitiveness, and often it's just that very large profitable company's just have the excess money anyway to easily afford a solar upgrade.

I think the damand curve of solar panels wil just smoothly continue as it's going now, steadily up.

Solar Cell Manufacturers Have Room to Grow

Consider though that Wind energy has a far larger share of world energy production for renewables, and the more in Europe. Solar has a lot of potential IMO, but for that 20% or more renewables europe wants to achieve, a larger part will be wind energy.

Canadian Solar Should Continue to Head Higher

Well Van gastel, i guess youll be pretty jealous on me, Since i am a belgian myself. ;)

I invest mainly in European renewables to. Mainly wind energy though. Vestas, Gamesa, Nordex, Repower, the last 2 are german stocks and somethign you should really consider. Also consider Q-cells in the solar space in youre country, it's the largest solar cell producer worldwide and a fast growing company.

Btw. i am not tax exempted i Belgium. Rather it's a 10% tax when selling with a gain. But thats fairly low all considerd.

Canadian Solar Should Continue to Head Higher

Agreed that, even at this point, csiq seems to have a great long term perspective and could be a multi bagger in the period of a year, provided that they keep up this momentum of growth.

Solar Power Plays Look to Grow with Clean Energy Act, Spanish Subsidies

What about the frikkin European solar company's, shouldn't they profit from the Spain case for ex. ? Renesola maybe? Q-cells or REC?

It seems that to SeekingAlpha and so many sites that promote solars, European solar company's simply do not exist!