Piggybank

First Solar Enters Residential Market with $25 Million SolarCity Financing

Gumby is not representative for the average commenter on this site. More representative for the average caps typer. And yes he made 4 posts full of caps, but it was all by him, so its only one commenter that types in caps.

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

/quote
Molnar Tuesday cut his rating on First Solar (FSLR) to a Conviction Sell from Buy, slashing his price target to $103 from $365.
quote/

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?

quote/
It would take a field of solar panels or wind turbines the size of a city, to power a city of the same size.
/quote

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

/quote
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??
quote/

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.

First Solar Spreads Some Sunshine

I can agree with the PE sentiment though as European investor.

Tell me why i should invest in SPWR with it's absurd valuation if i could just as well invest in REC. Both company's are comparable in size and quality of product but REC has atleast a decent profit margin on their sizable revenue and has a far lower market cap than SPWR. And then consider that subsidy's and economical sitatuition create more uncertainty over US solar stocks than European ones for ex. IMo valuations for SPWR and FSLR imo either reflect some chauvinism or speculation in the USA is just that more extreme. I'd go for the latter.

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?

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.

Solars Should Bounce Today

I got bored reading all the comments. In the end it's all irrelevant. The point Jack makes is clear enough, US goverment now accepts the idea of climate change too. Wel ladiladilaa, after all the BS, "poof" we accept climate change. Germany will continue to subsidize alternative energy, and they already did so for years. Energy resources like coal, uranium, gas and oil are all increasing in price, and energy demand itself is fastly increasing along with globalization. And we are all dependant for a large part on foreign country's to supply us with energy resources. World energy demand is hughe, there is just such an hughe space for alternative energy to grow in.

Some people identify alternative energy as a "bubble", others as the next bubble. It is not and it won't be a bubble neither, but it will sure look like one if you will see the stellar growth the alternative energy sector will have the next decade. Go read some income statements of established solar and wind energy company's, the average year to year growth is just ammazing.

Many people identify alternative energy as "the next big thing". Psycholigy is a large part of investing, and here you have a wide basis of people who are convinced of the potential of alternative energy. So am i, and IMO, rightly so. It strikes me that an fairly irrelevant 2008'ish little crisis has sown so many doubt among alternative energy investors, i do not doubt the long term potential of my stocks just because their stock has a few bad weeks.

The future is great for alternative energy, and noone needs some Wall street idiots to tell them otherwise and play some manipulation games. Wall street aint the center of the earth, and it has made HUGHE mistakes before. Atleast Germany has now an alternative energy sector creating ample new jobs, the USA on the other hand has a lot of empty houses. The antics of some of the SA editors here are just hilarious, i visit this site to have a good laugh for the most part. The amount of irony to spot is just excessive.

The devide in mentality across the pond clearly is quite deep. But Europe is in a far better shape these days, heck investors these days look to US based company's with a strong foot in Europe for revenue growth. It's utterly remarkable how much the world has changed in the last years, and especially so for the USA in relation to the rest of the world.Reality shows these days that a hughe amount of presumptions ingrained in the US mentality on various issue's have proven to be utterly wrong and shortminded, and it becomes time that the USA gets a new perspective on modern issue's like climate change and energy needs wich most other modern nations of this world have already accepted long before the USA. These issue's now form a large part of the political agenda of current presidential candidate's.

But what really needs to change is the mentality of certain groups withing US society. The Bush administration has been utterly ruining for the USA, but it remains so that it was a large part of USA society that supported Bush in ellection, in his actions and in his warmongering. It's ironic that so many US people now complain so much about Bush, in large part due to the war and the ramifications, while more than 95% supported for the Bush administration in the runup towards the Iraq war in a surge of Patriotism. Clearly, US society is gullible for lies and propaganda, and you cannot blame Fox media more than their watchers. Some people just don't know what they should believe in.

In europe we don't need some meddling Wall street schmucks. We have the largest alternative energy company's in the world and damn were quite happy with them too. Alternative energy will grow for decade in Europe with the mentality at wich we work on it. In the end it's inevitable, do or "die", and the more America pospone's it, the more they will fall behind.

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.

My Top 5 Alternative Energy Stocks - and 10 Honorable Mentions

1MW turbine's are small stake's compaared to vestas 3.5MW turbine's, the 4.5MW turbine's gamesa is developing, and the 5MW giants that Repower and Suzlon are putting out. And i'm not complaining on the profit im pulling in on wind turbine stocks in Europe.

That the turbine's cant be produced fast enough is because demand is so damn high, sure it takes some time to builmd them, but the wind turbine company's are expanding fast, and even at their rate Vestas is expecting the shortage to stay for a few years. All the more profit for them though. Vestas shot up 15% on last earnings, a week ago. Maybe you should consider Gamesa's earnings on thursday 15th of may.

I know some pretty hefty wind farms in development in Europe going over the 1 gigawatt total output, and even if it takes some space, there is always room in the sea. In the meantime takeovers in this sector are coman, Just recently European utility company SUEZ took over the largest wind farm in America, and Vestas is expanding in USA with a new factory.

Anyway, Andrew wanted to talk solar. Then again clearly he doesn't like any of the European Solar company's neither. this aint new on Seekingalpha, but Europe is well ahead in this sector and you would think that would be important in the grand sheme of things. Most of my solar investments are in renewable energy corp and Q-cells anyway. hey get MY honourable mention atleast.

As to the stocks listed. i have a small position left in ASTI, for reasons of their product, though i cant be all to happy about the stock dillution, lets hope they get really forward with that capital. I hav a large investment though in the bottom listed stock, 5N plus or VNP.TO, the "safe way" to play FSLR, but a company that has many strong advantage's in other fields to. Otherwise i stay somewhat out of the USA, don't like the dollar to much yet. I am following some wind farmers and own a position in NCEN.OB. A few more small positions in USA, but thats for an other topic.

There's a Solar Shakeout Coming - Citigroup

What a load of nonsense. I bet they the analysts at citigroup make their predictions on whether they throw well or not on a dartboard. Advice brought to you buy people who messed up big time in the credit market, at this point i would just do the reserve of what they are saying, look at their own stock, who still has confidence in this establishment?

Spain and Germany's subsidies program at risk? Like they know anything about it. What they came over here and asked Merkel and Zapatero themselfs? I bet they can't even point Frankfurt on the map.

Solars keep ramping up production due to high demand. Saying this demand won't rise in the future is more speculative giving the trend than saying demand will keep going up. Like Citigroup has a magic orb that can predict the future in this regard.

And then there is the matter of P/E's. FSLR and SPWR are valuated taking into account large growth in a large growth market. If this market won't grow like this Citigroup man predicts, then these stocks are overvalued. Putting a buy with target 450$ on FSLR in this regard is just rediculous, not to speak about SPWR.

Lets face it, Citigroup doesn't know much more about this market than we do, why would we listen to them?

Cleantech "Power 10" Ranking (Vol. I)

@quick, i mentioned above my list that it was incomplete. That shouldn't surprize, if i would list every uttility firm that owns some wind farms the the list would be endless, let alone listing all side bussiness with it to.

Oh and i don't think US investors are unsophisticated.