Solar and renewable energy
In general, I’m following the “tier 1” list of solar companies. Those are companies where banks are most eager to finance projects and the “t1” quarterly list is helpful to find interesting companies. There are roughly three types of solar cells: monocrystalline (most efficient), polycrystalline (cheapest), and thin film (e.g. integrated in windows or very bendable). The future is the very efficient multi-junction solar cells, which are research only currently, but which will have about double the efficiency. I invested in mono- and poly-crystalline companies, since I could not decide which tech is better and since the thin film companies I look at had quite high p/e ratios.
California has a lot of problems with electric lines, and regulations mandate to add solar to new buildings. Therefore, even though not the best, I invested in the local Sun power corp and got some shares in Maxn for free and invested then more in Maxn. If anyone knows a company that can benefit from the situation in Californian, please let me know.
I really like small cap solar companies, since they are usually overlooked and not part of an ETF and thus are potentially undervalued. I bought ReneSolar at $1 and they look good. If they drop again, I'd consider buying more.
Canadian Solar (CSIQ) seems quite good, since they focus on projects rather than producing hardware/cells. The latter is quite risky, since it is capital intensive and technology can change quickly, making factories obsolete. In research, such as done by Fraunhofer, there are multi-junction solar cells, which have an efficiency of around 38%, double of what is on the market. Since cells are produced roughly similar to computer chips (e.g. not easily upgradable for a factory), any current factory is obsolete once such new tech arrives. In March, their p/e was favorable.
JKS also looks good, they produce Monocrystalline cells, and they claim an efficiency of 24.79%.
There are a lot of interesting chinese companies which I cannot buy yet because I haven’t found a broker that let’s EU people invest in Chinese companies (IB is not giving trading permissions for margin accounts). I guess the Cinese companies are undervalued, since it is hard to buy shares from them. For example: LONGi, JA, Risen, Trina Solar, Fslr, Hongli, EGing, Jolywood, Waare, NeoSolarPower.
The next important aspect is storage and hydro. Especially “pumped hydro” is an old and efficient way to store large amounts of energy and balance grids, simply by pumping the water up a mountain in times of excess energy. This allows for longer and clean storage of energy and it can scale. The problem is, I only found one company that I could invest in. This is Iberdrola in Spain. They have one of the largest such pumped hydro projects, and are developing more. A lot of similar companies in Norway and Austria are private. I would be curious in finding more such companies.
I think hydrogen and similar technology will probably lose to battery tech in the long term, so I’m not interested. I did invest a very small sum in FCEL, since its stock is cheap and volatile, and because I think politicians are pushing for green energy, and see it as high risk investment. Also ExxonMobile invested in them.
I’m still researching wind. I think wind is inferior to solar, but I also think politicians (like in the EU) don’t know that, so they wind companies might get support from the government. Also, I’m not sure, but at least one Japanese company where Buffet invested has a subsidiary for wind energy. First I need to check if offshore or onshore is better. I would want to look at small cap or undervalued companies, but haven’t found one yet. If BP stock drops significantly, I would consider buying them for their green investment such as wind projects. Note that most solar companies that I liked had investments by Oil companies, so another way to look for investment targets is to check out investments by Oil companies.
I’m also looking at battery tech, magnets/motors (e.g. golf cars), inverters, smart grids etc. For batteries, I would love to buy CATL since Daimler heavenly invested in them. Again, my broker (IB) doesn’t allow me to invest in them, since they are from China. I’m interested when they get a dual listing. For inverters, I found only expensive companies and Chinese ones. Finally, smart grid ideas and power saving methods would be interesting.
Submitted September 19, 2020 at 08:30PM by stvaccount https://ift.tt/2ZUc2AJ
