Steven Thorpe

“This makes sense. The underwriters of the IPO, led by Goldman Sachs, could only support the shares for so long before market forces took over. And the market, in turn, has shown intense skepticism for cleantech stocks over the past five years.

It’s a pattern most visible with IPOs of solar companies. In 2004 and 2005, there was a golden age of growth for solar companies, with big venture capital investments. In 2006, there was a strong wave of such IPOs, and their stock prices fizzled within six months. This year, again, solar company Solyndra had to pull its IPO. The problem then, as now, was always the same: high costs and low profits. Clean technology is expensive, and it doesn’t have the benefit of the extensive government subsidies that go to fossil fuels like oil.”

A short but great article on Forbes.com regarding IPOs of cleantech companies – http://wallstreet.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2010/07/07/tesla-motors-not-so-different-after-all/?source=yahoo_quote

Recently completed to host the 2009 Goodwill Games, the stadium will be able to supply all the juice for its 3,300 lights and two jumbotrons, or local residents when the lights and screens are off.

Continue reading – http://news.discovery.com/tech/the-sunshine-coliseum.html

A few key sentences from this article -

• Governments and utilities worldwide are likely to spend $200 billion on so-called smart grid initiatives by 2015, a development that promises greater energy efficiency on a global scale, but that is only a small step towards what could be done to use energy more efficiently.
• Right now, only a fifth of the energy we actually burn or otherwise generate for electricity is actually used.
• A smarter grid is the basic building block for such initiatives as electric and hybrid cars, and utility executives like Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, consider increasing efficiency a source of energy in and of itself.
• Bringing a full smart grid online in the United States alone is a $1 to $2 trillion proposition over the next couple of decades, according to research by Jackson Associates, and it will save $48 billion for the 200 largest U.S. utilities.
• Take, for instance, the Bush tax cuts of the early 2000s. That legislation cost $2.48 trillion from 2001-2010—enough to have already modernized our electric grid by now, if we’d chosen to invest it that way.
• Closer to our own time, the government will spend more money bailing out banks, AIG, General Motors and Chrysler than the entire world will spend on smart grid technology that could lay the groundwork for future growth and help mitigate the effects of global warming.

Read the full article here – http://www.portfolio.com/views/blogs/daily-brief/2009/12/29/smart-grid-spending-on-the-rise-but-not-enough/

This handout photo provided by the South Korean Blue House shows an illustration of nuclear power plants to be built by a South Korea-led consortium in Sila, 330 kilometres (204 miles) west of the United Arab Emirates capital. The consortium won a 20-billion-USD contract to build four nuclear power plants in the Middle East country.

(AFP/Pool/Blue House)

A look at nuclear energy production and policies in selected countries around the world, as the UK government announces its long-term nuclear energy plans -

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7179189.stm