Redwood_1

Barron's Is Wrong: Solar Offers Good Value

ENER makes panels? I did not know that. I thought they made a Building Integrated PV that could be rolled out over the roof, taking the place of conventional roofing material, thus offering a host of other cost advantages over conventional crystaline PV. They must have given that up so that they could offer instead a product that makes it easier for idiot analysts to plug them into the same box as all the other PV producers.

Too Late to the Oil Party? Consider the Alternative

That was my comment about oil linked to transportation but not electric power. The following comment about heating oil is well taken, but still, that's heating, not electric power. Very little heating in the US is from electric power. Fan energy is not insignificant, but electric resisitance heating has been phased out to the point where it is negligible. The analysis in this article doesn't really go into solar thermal, which would compete with heating oil. What's needed is to simplify the analysis and make sure we're comparing apples to apples, and make sure we understand when oranges appear in the bushel.

Too Late to the Oil Party? Consider the Alternative

I'm an alternative energy bull, but I believe it is an incorrect assumption that oil and alternative energy are necessarily linked in any substantive way.

The vast majority of alternative energy stocks have more to do with electric power than transportation. Oil is and always has been about transportation. Our standard power sources are coal, natural gas, and nuclear, with gas taking up a greater and greater share. Less than 3% of power production is from oil, most of that is peaking or backup generation, and even that is in decline.

This doesn't discount your analysis as a component of a trading strategy, but as a long term investment strategy it's important to understand that oil is not in fact directly linked in any way to solar, wind, or other distributed generation that make up what we think of as alternative energy.

(The obvious exception of course is any AE that deals with, influences, or is influenced by transportation, such as batteries or electric vehicles, and of course companies like Energy Conversion Devices do have a dog in that race, but still, it's a small factor relative to the electric power part of the equation).