SolarCity Founder & COO Peter Rive and SolarCity Founder & CEO Lyndon Rive celebrate the company’s IPO at Nasdaq Thursday. The successful SolarCity IPO may indicate a proclivity towards investment in solar system installers over manufacturers. (Mark Von Holden/AP Images for SolarCity)
SolarCity IPO: How it beat the solar curse
A day after lowering expectations by cutting the price of its shares, SolarCity Corp. saw its initial public offering make a soaring Wall Street debut.
SolarCity's shares opened at $9.25 on Nasdaq, up 16 percent from its IPO price. By Thursday's close, it had gained $3.79 per share, a stunning rise of nearly 50 percent.
What a difference a day makes.
The change of fortune is a sign investors may be warming to the "buy side" of the solar industry. As an installer, SolarCity does not compete with the proliferation of cheap Chinese panels arriving on US shores. It instead capitalizes on the flooded market. ( Continue… )
Jose Zuinga, senior installer for SolarCity, prepares to install solar panels on the roof of a home in Palo Alto, Calif., in this 2011 file photo. SolarCity announced Wednesday Dec. 12, 2012, it will reduce the price of its IPO shares to $8 apiece, instead of an expected $13 to $15 per share. (Tony Avelar/The Christian Science Monitor/File)
SolarCity IPO share price slashed. Cloudy skies ahead for solar?
The business outlook for SolarCity Corp. dimmed this week.
The installer of residential solar systems postponed its much-anticipated announcement of its initial public offering Tuesday, only to sharply reduce its share price in announcing its IPO the following day.
Instead of the $13 to $15 per share price it previously expected, SolarCity now says it will sell its IPO shares at $8 apiece, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission Wednesday. The San Mateo, Calif.,-based company also announced it would offer 11.5 million shares of stock, up from 10.1 million shares. The IPO could be floated later this week.
The price reduction cuts the company's previously estimated value of nearly $1 billion almost in half, to about $584.6 million. ( Continue… )
A storage tank looms over a freeway at the Enbridge Edmonton terminal in Edmonton in this August 2012 file photo. Enbridge's latest investment will allow the energy company to increase fuel access by 400,000 barrels per day of light oil to markets in the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario, according to Consumer Energy Report (Dan Riedlhuber/Reuters/File )
Enbridge set to invest $6.28 billion in oil pipeline
Energy firm Enbridge has announced that it has received support from shippers and will go ahead with its investment of $6.28 billion in expanding the system of pipelines that transport crude from locations in Canada and the United States around North America.
The project, dubbed the Light Oil Market Access Program, will see improvements made to several pipeline systems spanning the continent in order to boost their capacity, including the North Dakota regional system, the United States mainline system, and the Canadian mainline terminal capability system.
This expanded ability to move light crude around the continent will have benefits for many refineries, notably those on the east coast, allowing Enbridge to increase fuel access by 400,000 barrels per day of light oil to markets in the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario, as well as many areas in the midwestern United States. (Read More: Obama Under Increasing Pressure to Make Keystone XL Decision)
The announcement comes as Enbridge works to improve its penetration in delivering crude to North American markets, beginning with the launch of the so-called Eastern Access Program announced in May 2012, and a similar program intended to help ship oil produced in the Gulf of Mexico; all money invested so far has improved the mainlines that ship oil throughout the continent. ( Continue… )
In this 2009 file photo, an A123 Systems Inc. high power lithium ion cell for electric vehicles is displayed in Livonia, Mich. When the bankrupt battery maker announced Sunday that it would sell its assets to China's Wanxiang Group, critics have warned about US security threats from the pending sale. (Paul Sancya/AP/File)
A123 sale to China: threat to US security?
The auction sale to a Chinese company of bankrupt advanced battery maker A123 Systems, which received millions in US taxpayer support, is drawing heavy fire for both national and economic security concerns.
On Sunday, the US-based auto parts subsidiary of China's Wanxiang Group, outbid US-based Johnson Controls, Japan's NEC, and Germany's Siemens by paying $256.6 million for the assets of the company. A Delaware bankruptcy court was weighing the deal Tuesday.
If approved by the bankruptcy judge, the sale of A123 still must go through one more hoop. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a federal advisory group led by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, still must approve any sale of a US business to a foreign company.
Under normal circumstances, sale of assets of a bankrupt auto-parts supplier would draw little attention. Not so for Waltham, Mass.-based A123, which makes lithium-ion batteries for next-generation plug-in hybrid and all-electric battery-powered cars. The reason: its $249 million clean-energy grant from the Obama administration. ( Continue… )
The Chicago skyline is seen in this June 2012 file photo. The US Department of Energy awarded the Argonne National Laboratory a $120 million grant over 5 years, alongside a $35 million commitment for a new 45,000 square foot facility from the State of Illinois, Stuebi writes. (Carolyn Kaster/AP/File)
Is Chicago a new cleantech hub?
At the end of November, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that it had selected Argonne National Laboratory in suburban Chicago to host the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), and bestowed upon it a $120 million grant over 5 years, alongside a $35 million commitment for a new 45,000 square foot facility from the State of Illinois.
As noted in this article in the Chicago Tribune, the goal for the JCESR is to improve battery technologies by a factor of five — five times cheaper, with five times higher performance — within five years.
One of the nation’s Energy Innovation Hubs just being launched, the JCESR has an impressive list of collaborators. In addition to Argonne, four other national laboratories – Lawrence Berkeley, Pacific Northwest, Sandia and SLAC National Accelerator – will also conduct research under the JCESR umbrella. University research partners include Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and theUniversity of Michigan. A long list of the leading venture capital firms active in the cleantech arena – including ARCH Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Technology Partners and Venrock – will serve on an advisory panel to help focus the research on commercially-interesting opportunities. Corporate titans Applied Materials (NASDAQ: AMAT), Dow Chemical (NYSE: DOW)and Johnson Controls (NYSE: JCI) have loaned their names to the effort. ( Continue… )
In this March 2012 file photo, PetroChina oil rigs are seen near the banks of a snow-covered lake in Daqing in northeastern China's Heilongjiang province. Because of the cost issue, a transition away from oil will likely require very long time, up to 50 years, Tverberg writes. (AP/File)
Leveraging energy: why China succeeds where the US fails
If an employer wants to maximize profits, it will want to leverage its use of high-priced energy sources. From an employer’s point of view, there are basically three kinds of energy, from most to least expensive:
- Human energy
- Petroleum energy
- Everything else
If an employer wants to keep its costs low, it needs to minimize its use of expensive energy sources. The primary way it does this is by leveraging expensive energy sources with cheaper energy sources that help keep overall energy costs in line with what competitors (including overseas competitors) are paying. Thus, employers will want to use as little human and petroleum energy as possible, instead using cheap energy to substitute.
Human Energy
Human energy is the most expensive form of energy. It is very expensive because an employer needs to pay the employee enough to live on. This amount includes the cost of energy to fulfill the human’s needs, plus enough extra to cover taxes to cover the cost of energy for those who for some reason cannot work, plus taxes for maintenance of public infrastructure. An employer can keep his cost of human energy low by ( Continue… )
A heating oil delivery truck drives through Alexandria, Va., in this 2010 file photo. Of all four fuels, oil is the most costly way to heat a home this winter, according to the EIA. (Molly Riley/Reuters/File)
Heating oil: a last stand in the Northeast?
It’s getting hard to justify using oil heat, even in the Northeast, where the fossil fuel is making its last stand in the home-heating market.
The gap between heating oil and natural gas prices has grown so large – the biggest in at least a decade – that the incentive to convert to cheaper natural gas keeps growing. While it can cost $10,000 or more for a homeowner to make the switch, conversions appear to be on the rise. Some states are trying to make it easier for homeowners to convert, touting efficiency gains and emissions reductions. But the oil-heat industry isn't giving up without a fight.
The latest battleground is Connecticut. Gov. Dannel Malloy wants to extend gas lines to provide more than 300,000 customers the option to stick with oil or switch to natural gas, which would more than halve winter heating costs. Oil service companies, often small family-owned concerns, call his plan favoritism.
"They're using state resources to eliminate jobs, delivery drivers, customer service representatives," Stephen G. Rosentel, head of a family-owned home heating business in Danbury, told the Associated Press. "These are real jobs and real people, and they matter." ( Continue… )
The number of homes relying on wood-burning as a primary heat source is projected to rise 3 percent this winter. (Pat Wellenbach/AP/File)
Fighting winter with fire? Wood-burning on the rise.
Americans are warming to an old-fashioned technology to heat their homes: wood-burning stoves.
Some people are looking for cheap heat. Others prefer wood because it can free them from the energy grid. Wood consumption for home heating has risen steadily over the past decade in the United States, reversing a decline in the 1980s and '90s, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA). The number of homes using wood as a primary heat source has risen 24 percent since 2006, and is projected to rise another 3 percent this winter.
But just as wood is going mainstream, its growth as a heating source is under threat. Environmental groups point to troublesome airborne particulates created by burning wood. Several groups, including the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Clean Air Watch, sent a letter this month to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) asking that federal wood-burning standards, set in 1988, be made more stringent.
"[T]he stuff we've learned about particles since the 1990s is voluminous," says Janice Nolen, assistant vice president of national policy at the American Lung Association in Washington. "We have had thousands of studies since then that are not addressed in the evidence the EPA has on the requirement book because they simply didn't exist." ( Continue… )
An oil rig is seen in the Gulf of Mexico near the Chandeleur Islands, off of Louisiana in this April 2010 file photo. Freeport-McMoRan's acquisition of McMoRan Exploration comes as McMoRan Exploration struggles to unclog its ultra-deep oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. (Gerald Herbert/AP/File)
Freeport-McMoRan to acquire oil, gas assets in $20 billion deal
Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold Inc., one of the world’s largest copper producers, announced Wednesday it will purchase a pair of oil and gas companies in a deal totaling $20 billion.
The Phoenix-based mining company will pay $3.4 billion in cash to purchase its sister company, McMoRan Exploration Co., which was spun off from Freeport-McMoRan in the 1990s. Also, Plains Exploration, a Houston-based oil and gas company, will be acquired for about $6.9 billion in cash and stock. Freeport-McMoRan will assume an additional $11 billion in debt as part of the deal.
The move is the second attempt at diversification beyond metals for Freeport-McMoRan and a lifeline for McMoRan Exploration, which has been struggling to persuade investors that its clogged, ultra-deep oil well in the Gulf of Mexico will soon come online. McMoRan shares have fallen 46 percent in the past year and dropped 9.7 percent early Monday as the company announced the well was restricted by skin or formation damage.
"The transaction offers significant values to the [McMoRan] and [Plains Exploration] shareholders and will enable [Freeport-McMoRan] to build on these values through a much larger, well capitalized platform," James R. Moffett, chairman of the board of Freeport-McMoRan, said in a statement. ( Continue… )
The Solar Impulse airplane makes its historic 26-hour solar-powered flight in this July 2010 file photo. While it's not the first solar-powered plane, the Solar Impulse is unlike others in that its energy-efficient batteries allow the plane to stay aloft even at night. (Keystone/Fabrice Coffrini/Pool/AP)
Solar-powered plane to circumnavigate globe. How will it fly at night?
Has Greek mythology taught us nothing?
The man who flew around the world in a hot air balloon now wants to make the same trip using only the power of the sun.
Bertrand Piccard – not Icarus – plans to make the trip in his Solar Impulse, a fragile-looking plane that weighs less than an SUV and is powered by the 12,000 solar cells that make up its overlong wings.
While it's not the first sun-powered plane, the Solar Impulse is unlike others in that its energy-efficient batteries allow the plane to soar even through dark night skies.
"These cells capture the energy of the sun and transform it into electricity," Mr. Piccard explained in an interview with 60 Minutes. "This electricity goes simultaneously to the engine and to the batteries. Then we reach the next sunrise, and we capture the sun again, and we can continue, theoretically forever." ( Continue… )
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