Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. and Clean Edge Inc. have announced the results of their semi-annual review of the Nasdaq Clean Edge Green Energy Index, which will become effective with the market open on Monday, March 23, 2009. One company is added while 11 are dropped from the indice.
After a run of some years of heady double digit growth the Solar PV sector in the US has hit a period of slower growth in which some of the weaker players are being shaken out of the market. This year will be characterized by consolidation as more successful firms and better capitalized firms build their market share and absorb weaker players. This shakeout was inevitable and is natural, but it was undoubtedly triggered by the financial crash of late 2008 coupled with the bursting of the oil futures speculative bubble and the temporary collapse in prices on the oil spot markets.
What is the green economy? It promises a future more harmonious with nature, more attuned to the kind of tomorrow that is lying ahead and it also projects a sense of hopefulness and prosperity. The green economy is a rapidly growing and increasingly important sector in the overall economy generating more than a trillion dollars in revenue and employing many millions of people. It embraces such diverse industries as renewable energy production and electric energy distribution, energy efficiency and storage, organic agriculture, green transportation and green building.
Many believe that the green economy will be powered by the wind and by the sun. But fewer people are aware that to make this possible we need to profoundly transform the current electric grid to control and manage renewable energy supplies. Balancing load and demand is a quite a challenge with renewable supplies that are intermittent and depend on the weather. Without a robust ability to continuously balance energy supply and demand, wind or solar energy sources can have a profoundly negative impact on grid operations, reliability and power quality and force grid operators to make costly and inefficient adaptations to current spot conditions.
The continued global financial crisis has been hurting the green economy. The sudden and very sharp drop in the availability of capital has dried up needed new investments and funding for new many green economy projects and businesses. Because many green or clean tech businesses are in an early expanding phase of their growth, they have been especially hard hit by the current dearth of capital. Quite a number of green firms are at serious risk of failure because of this capital starvation.
There may never be a better time to begin new building retrofits and investments in energy efficiency than the climate that prevails today. Commercial and residential buildings accounted for 39 percent of the total US energy consumption. Lowering these on-going expenditures can have such an impact on the bottom line for building operators and owners that this may represent one of the safest and most lucrative places to invest in. The green building sector offers many opportunities for retrofitting existing buildings to increase their energy efficiency lower their water usage or storm water runoff and so forth that present a whole slew of skilled labor and small business ideas for enterprising individuals and contractors willing to make the leap as well as largely untapped growth opportunities for larger corporations.
Earlier this month, First Solar, Inc. (Nasdaq: FSLR) announced that it has reduced its manufacturing cost for solar modules in the fourth quarter 2009 to 98 cents per watt, becoming the first solar cell manufacturing company to break the $1 per watt price barrier. This is a major price milestone for the solar photovoltaic manufacturing sector and represents a significant step towards achieving what is known in the industry as as grid parity, the price level where the per watt cost for solar electricity reaches the current averaged cost of electricity on the grid a goal First Solar plans to reach by 2012.
In 2008 the US experienced an explosive rate of growth in installed wind power capacity. Last year the US added an additional 8,358 megawatts (MW) of new generating capacity (enough to serve over 2 million homes) surpassing Germany as the world’s largest producer of wind energy.
Word around the blogs is that Van Jones has been tapped to serve as a “green jobs czar” in the Obama administration. We’re still trying to confirm, and we’ll have more soon on this potential new role for someone who’s been a household name.
