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

• Mr. Prechter is convinced that we have entered a market decline of staggering proportions — perhaps the biggest of the last 300 years.
• “I’m saying: ‘Winter is coming. Buy a coat,’ ” he said. “Other people are advising people to stay naked. If I’m wrong, you’re not hurt. If they’re wrong, you’re dead. It’s pretty benign advice to opt for safety for a while.”
• His advice: individual investors should move completely out of the market and hold cash and cash equivalents, like Treasury bills, for years to come. (For traders with a fair amount of skill and willingness to embrace risk, he suggests other alternatives, like shorting the market or making bets on volatility.) But ultimately, “the decline will lead to one of the best investment opportunities ever,” he said.
• For a rough parallel, he said, go all the way back to England and the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, a crash that deterred people “from buying stocks for 100 years,” he said. This time, he said, “If I’m right, it will be such a shock that people will be telling their grandkids many years from now, ‘Don’t touch stocks.’ ”
• He has far less day-to-day influence now, after years spent developing a theory he calls “socionomics,” which holds “social moods” as the cause not only of market cycles but also of economic and political events. A grand cycle is ending, he says, and the time for reckoning is near.
• In 2002, he published “Conquer the Crash,” which predicted misery ahead. Even so, he said in 2008 that the market would soon rally sharply — then said late last year that stocks were about to fall and that the great decline would resume.

Read the whole article – http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/your-money/04stra.html?ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=all

I would think they wish this never surfaced again -

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)

BAGHDAD (AFP) – Iraq struck deals with several foreign energy giants to nearly triple its oil output in an auction that ended on Saturday, as the country bids to become one of the world’s biggest energy producers.

Major agreements were reached with Russian firm Lukoil and Anglo-Dutch company Shell over giant fields during the two-day sale, while contracts were also awarded to China’s CNPC and Malaysia’s Petronas.

“Iraq’s oil production will reach 12 million barrels per day (bpd) within the next six years,” Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani told reporters after the auction. “That is the highest production level of the world’s oil-producing countries.”

Overall, the deals agreed on Friday and Saturday promise to increase Iraq’s oil production by more than 4.7 million bpd in the coming seven years.

Combined with agreements reached since a similar auction in June, the country is hoping to raise production to around 12 million bpd in 2017 from about 2.5 million now.

“The question now is, is this realistic,” Ruba Husari, the Baghdad-based founder and editor of www.iraqoilforum.com, asked AFP regarding the production targets. “Can they (the companies) deliver?”

Continue reading – http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20091212/bs_afp/iraqoil_20091212112825