Dana Blankenhorn

The Renewable Energy Sweet Spot is Storage

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 17 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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While most attention in renewable energy is focused on solar panels, or wind turbines, or the use of pine pellets and algae for fuel, the real sweet spot is in storage.

Imre Gyuk , energy storage program manager at the Department of Energy, says it's not just because solar and wind are intermittant. It's also because an increasingly computer-driven society requires cleaner power.

You know this in your own life. If you have a desktop PC, chances are you have a Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) sitting under your desk, or at least a “power conditioning” power strip next to you – maybe both. Spikes can damage critical components.

Tax Carbon in the Name of Growth

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 7 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The following is going to annoy my liberal friends, but hear me out.

The decisive turn in a generation's political thesis, which is a collection of myths and values driving power, the point at which you go from winning elections to winning them for a generation, comes when business moves to your side.

You don't need all of business. You only need the rising tide of business to be on your side, that element of business driving economic growth.

Without significant business support, your side of the political world is always swimming upstream. That's because the business of America is business, even its political business is business, and anyone who questions that doesn't know America. (This Rising Tide is a restaurant in Scarborough, Maine. We hear good things about the lobster.)

Why the Crisis Continues

Think of this as Volume 17, Number 5 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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Previous crises in American political history were pretty much settled by this point after the crisis election.

By January of 1865 the Confederacy was all but dead. By this time in 1901 the Populists were a spent force. The initial crisis that created the New Deal was settled by 1937, although the struggle for democracy was just beginning. By 1973, we were well past the 1960s and talking full-time about Watergate.

While the course of our future politics seems settled, however, the political crisis that began in 2008 is ongoing, and the underlying economic cause – the War Against Oil – seems barely to have been launched.

You may ask why. I'm here to tell you:

The Next Boom Has Begun

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 51 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I have just one prediction for 2013, but it's an important one.

Good times.

The economy is going to grow, and faster than we expect, for two main reasons:

1. A thumb down on energy prices.

2. The automation of just about everything.

What is Money?

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 37 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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On my new beat, at Seeking Alpha and TheStreet.Com, people talk about money all the time.

Money is, in fact, the great mystery of my working life. What is it?

Is gold money? Is a dollar money? What makes them money?

What makes them money is that they're a store of value people understand and accept. There's an assumption that if the world comes crashing down tomorrow people with gold will have money but people with paper won't.

I no longer think that's right, because the only value gold can store is excess value, and if there's no excess value to store it's not money.

Solar Has Its MITS Moment

The MITS Altair looks like a box with switches, but in 1975 it was the coolest thing evah and remains an important historical milestone.

That's because it was the first actual computer you, an individual, could buy and actually do calculations with.

It's true in retrospect that MITS didn't understand the vocabulary of personal computing, that we needed a familiar input (a keyboard), and a familiar output (a TV) to make this more than an engineering toy. But still...there's a reason Bill Gates visited founder Ed Roberts on his deathbed. 

Well, solar power is now having its MITS moment, and the Ed Roberts of our time may turn out to be Arthur Chew.

Chew runs a little outfit called Spinray Energy, in North Scituate, a town in western Rhode Island midway between Providence and the Connecticut border. And his MITS Altair, called the PowerDeck, is an $1,100 do-it-yourself solar system, which you can just plug into your house. No contract, no engineer, no nothing, just 200 watts of pure solar power. UL-listed. 

Chew is modest about what he's done, noting that it's not a replacement for rooftop solar arrays costing tens of thousands of dollars, more of a “stepping stone” for those who want to “experiment” with the idea.

All Chew has done is create a kit around simple panels and microinverters, then put it on Amazon.com. Amazon, in turn, is now offering the kit for 10% off, $999 if you act now. They're saying shipments take one to three weeks.

I'm being careful when I call this a MITS system. I don't want you to think that all the problems of DIY solar are solved. But the way is now clear to build on this and actually create the solar equivalent of the Apple II, years ahead of schedule.

It's an important moment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fossil Fuel Gloating Premature

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 19 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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These are tough times for the renewable energy business. But it's always darkest before the dawn.

People are writing about a “green tech crash” but that's after the fact. Most U.S.-based green tech companies are flat on their backs and the few that continue to trade, like First Solar (FSLR), are down so far it looks like up.

What the green bears are fearing is an end to federal subsidies of the space between now and 2014. They assume that, since the space was subsidized in 2009, and needed to be subsidized, it must always need to be subsidized, that it lives on subsidy and can't exist without it, that it will disappear without subsidy.

I know the Koch Brothers and their minions across the political world wish that were the case.  But that's not the case.

Ultra-Bear Hugs: Your Assurance of a Bull Run

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 13 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I like to joke that I've predicted nine of the last four recessions. Most who follow the market can probably make the same claim.

There are always Cassandras out there, like Peter Schiff, convinced that the end is near. Every once in a while, as in 2007, they are right. Usually, they are wrong.

Some 35 years as a business reporter has convinced me that the market's main danger signal comes when people like Schiff are disdained or, worse, ignored. That's an indication that everyone is in the market and buying, that no one is considering possible trouble ahead and selling, so the next step is inevitably going to be a trip and fall.

Schiff's bearish call is based on Austrian school economics , the idea that government should have no role in the market, and that ultimately the only cure for excess is austerity. He blames government policies for the last crash, and believes all intervention since then assures another crash, this time based in lack of faith in government.

I disagree. I admit there is danger in continuing to run huge deficits. But growth provides a glide path toward balance, and moves toward balance reduce the ratio between GDP and total debt, as Fed chair Ben Bernanke says, and as we found in the 1990s. I think we're more likely at the start of something than the end.

Besides, technology is naturally deflationary, and deflation is a far greater danger to any economy than moderate inflation. Efficiency technologies create commodity deflation, just as Moore's Law created deflation in goods production and transport. The Austrian School not only defies Keynes, with no explanation for the growth of either the 1930s or the post-war era, but Moore as well.

But if Schiff's concerns were ignored, or dismissed, if there were no stories about ultra-bears sounding alarms, then I would be bearish. Because everyone was boosting Internet stocks in 1999. And everyone was telling us to buy housing in 2006. Anyone who disagreed – and I disagreed quite loudly in the first instance – was dismissed as a crank.

Ignoring warnings is a sure sign a market crash is near.

A Growth Strategy

Think of this as Volume 16, Number 8 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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I have written a lot lately about how our politics are like those of 1972, and how economic policy drives the political train.

But how do you turn all that into a growth strategy? (To the right, the avatar of the last generation's growth, and its co-creator, Steve Wozniak.)

First, understand where growth will come from, after 2012. The War Against Oil will be a war of ideas, and theories, and tests of those theories in the form of start-ups. The nation that wins this future will have the best environment for not only creating ideas, but nourishing them, testing them, and discarding those that don't work.

The Real China vs. U.S. War in Solar is Technology, not Price

The U.S. complaint about Chinese “dumping” of polysilicon solar panels is a sideshow to the real battle, over which technology will dominate the next generation of solar panels.

GTM Research indicates polysilicon costs could drop this year to 70 cents per watt, although producers are doing all they can to dampen that speculation.

The action is in new technologies that will drop costs far below that level on CIGS and thin films of all kinds.

REC Group of Norway, an integrated maker of polysilicon-based panels, says their Peak Energy series can deliver a return on investment in just 12 months with the highest performance in the industry.

Meanwhile gallium-arsenide cell producer Semprius, based on North Carolina, says its print-transfer technology has produced a module with an efficiency of 33.9% – nearly three times what current cells produce. Scaling that up, raising yields and dropping production costs, could have a profound impact on the market. (Siemens has a 16% stake in Semprius.)

It's not just higher performance, but lower cost achieved through production efficiency that is driving these markets forward. This means leadership in the space remains highly fluid.

And to this has to be added improvements in inverter technology, which can cut costs by increasing the amount of DC power produced by a cell that goes onto the AC grid, to system manufacturing costs, to channel costs, and to reductions in the cost of getting installations approved by government at all levels.

As I have said before these are early days in the solar industry. This is going to become the cheap energy no matter how much we drill baby drill. The only real question is whether America can capitalize on its advantages in research and capital delivery, not whether China plays “fair.”