Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Spire makes a sale. Nice!

Spire to Build Manufacturing Line in India.

They're basically in the same line of business as AMAT, in terms of selling factories to those that want to get into the Solar Manufacturing Business. They seem to be having some success.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

AMAT Sunfab Thin Film Line Brochure.

BTW, here's the sunfab line.

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

12 day Chinese Coal Supply.

China down to 12 days worth of coal - report

CHINA only has enough coal for 12 days of consumption, three days less than a month ago, state media reported Wednesday, sounding the alarm bells over the nation's most important source of energy.

Found by Cardiakarrest of Yahoo.

Friday, April 11, 2008

New Gore Slideshow.

See the video.

Credit to Mom_Pop401k on the Yahoo boards for the find.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Update on New Jersey's Solar Financing Program.

As previously mentioned here.


PSE&G Receives Green Light to Launch Solar Investment Program.

PSE&G Solar Loan Program - Official Info Page.


I want my Credit Union to start a program like this.

Info on Today's Senate Vote:

Vote Summary

H.R.3221

Funds incoming for Algal Biodiesel Production.

Green Plains Renewable Energy approved for $2,190,407 grant for Algal Biodiesel

Teaser: "The United States Department of Energy estimates that if algae fuel replaced all the petroleum fuel in the United States, it would require 15,000 square miles (38,849 square kilometers), which is a few thousand square miles larger than Maryland."

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

FSLR and the Tellurium Fiasco.

It's interesting to see First Solar so well hyped, while the Tellurium issue goes undiscussed by the Investment Community. The possibility of a price spike in Tellurium has been discussed for some time over at the Stock Psychology Blog, and at that Author's posts at Seeking Alpha.

Here's his latest post on the subject.

It sure looks like there's a hell of a spike happening in the price of Tellurium. To me, it's reminiscent of what's been happening in Silicon, and it's just the kind of price movement that makes highly dependent industries struggle with competitiveness. The difference between Tellurium and Silicon, of course, is that Tellurium is incredibly rare on earth, while Silicon is incredibly common. With Tellurium, you can't just increase manufacturing capacity freely, because there simply isn't enough raw material of refine, whereas with Silicon, though refining is expensive, there is a vast amount of raw material available for as far as the eye can see.

Excellent News. Chinese Banks to invest in US Securities.

China Permits U.S. Investments

Chinese banks will be allowed to invest their clients' money in U.S.-traded stocks and mutual funds, China's banking regulator said after signing an agreement with SEC regulators. While China has been a major buyer of U.S. Treasuries, Beijing has had strict limits on foreign investing. Analysts expect Chinese investors will slowly, but steadily, begin trading in U.S. stocks.


Here's another link that describes this process.

Spire gets a helpful Contract out of China.

Spire Gets Contract for Combined Solar Module and Cell Line in China

The company said the order includes a 25-megawatt (MW) module factory and an adjacent 25MW solar cell factory designed to produce high efficiency multi-crystalline cells.

Jiangxi Gemei Sci-Tech expects that its vertically integrated solar facility will form the cornerstone of a new science and technology-manufacturing center in Jiangxi, a southern province in China.



I always liked their idea of selling turnkey facilities for manufacturing of Solar equipment. I figured that in a time when Solar Capacity had to be run up very quickly, that was a good business plan. Well, they seem to be having some success.

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Community Reinvestment Act

This is the original law that brought us Securitized Sub-Prime Mortgages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act

The original law was passed in 1977, and it was modified in 1995 under Bill Clinton. The first Subprimes were Securitized in 1997, and the law was revisited in 2002 with changes occuring in 2005.

I remember Bill Clinton talking about how he was going to stimulate investment in Urban areas, particularly poor ones. He was somewhat successful in this, and I'm now thinking that this law might have had something to do with it.

So, is it to blame for today's problems? Was it a bad law, or bad idea? It would be tempting to throw Bill under the bus on this, considering that he's a political opponent at this point in time, but no, I think it was a sensible idea, and probably benefitted alot of very legit sub-prime borrowers since '97. On the other hand, it definately appears to have been taken too far, whether this was because the Government Incentive was so powerful that Banks would continue to fall all over themselves to rack up more Mortgage debt? Or did Banks take on this tremendous mountain of debt because they discovered that there wwere incredible profits in it... as long as the number of defaults remained very low.

Personally, I suspect that it was the profit motive for Banks, along with the convenience in distributing the Mortgages through Securitization, that caused the excess.