General Electric has demonstrated a new, low cost technology for producing LED lighting.   If it proves successful and competitive in quality, it could have significant impacts on the speed at which LED’s will come to dominate future lighting technologies and at which the vast efficiency improvements of LED’s will reduce the consumption of electricity.  It also might allow G.E. to dominate the LED field and possibly hurt the competitive position of CREE, Inc.  Since CREE stock sells at a high multiple of estimated 2009 earnings, which estimates are coming down, …

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2008 Thus Far: A Preview of Coming Attractions

My concern has been that at some point shortages of oil will cause a falling-stocks, rising-oil phenomenon that will crush my oil related stocks along with the whole market. 2008 has started like that. Oil was up 6.34% as of 2/29 (per the ETF symbol OIL) but stocks were down 8.5% (in terms of the S&P 500 ETF symbol SPY). For oil-related stocks, the falling stock market trumped the rising oil market, as I have expected. IYE, a broad-based oil-stock ETF, was down …

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One of my investment themes is that LED’s will be the dominant lighting technology of the future.  Since LED’s are based on silicon chips and since chip-based products have such a strong history of rapid quality improvement and cost reduction, I think LED’s will become better and better and will cost less and less over time.  Their energy efficiency is already the best and their longevity is also a proven quality. 

One  corollary of the eventual triumph of LED’s is that compact fluorescents are a passing fad.    The problems of CFL’s include …

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The following report posted on The Energy Blog was interesting to me first because it explains in simple terms (the ones I need) how a Stirling system works to convert sunlight to electrical power and secondly because it indicates one potentially viable direction that concentrating solar may take.   I firmly believe that in the end we will come to depend on electrical power for virtually every need and it will be generated to a very great degree from sunlight.

Here is is the report:
February 15, 2008
Sandia, Stirling Energy Systems Set New …

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I’ve reported on new CSP plants that are planned for construction in the desert, but the information below from the New York Times in a 2/1/2008, an article titled, "A Green Energy Industry Takes Root in California" was news to me. I suspect the future of electrical generation will include a very large dose of small to medium sized CSP plants built fairly close to the customer base so as to reduce distribution costs and losses of power.   This seems like an example.  "In 2007, 100 megawatts …

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Here is information courtesy of The Energy Blog on a cheap, simple way to create electricity from waves.  It has few moving parts or electrical connections to shore that could be maintenance problems.   It could cost under 4 cents per kilowatt hour.   The problem I see is that it would require both offshore and shorefront real estate.  Thus, it may not be economically or politically feasible in areas with high shoreline property values.  It may be primarily useful in developing countries. 

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Scientific American Magazine - January, 2008 A Solar Grand Plan By 2050 solar power could end U.S. dependence on foreign oil and slash greenhouse gas emissions By Ken Zweibel, James Mason and Vasilis Fthenakis Next Back Schott AG/Commercial Handout/EPA/Corbis A massive switch from coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power plants to solar power plants could supply …

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Transition to the Electric Economy

New year’s day is a good time for long term thinking and planning. Today I want to relate some fairly visible long term prospects for global energy changes to a few of their more obscure short term investment implications that are actionable.

The great game of the next era in human use of energy is going to be the transition from a petro/electric economy to a fully electric one, motivated by the end of affordable fossil fuels. Transportation is the name of this game because it uses …

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The following was written by Tom Konrad

#4 Composite Technology Corp. (CPTC.OB)

I first recommended CPTC last April in an article about how electricity transmission is essential for renewable energy on a large scale. At the time I focused on how transmission helps even out the variability of wind power, but transmission is going to be if anything more essential to the development of Concentrating Solar Power [CSP]. It is true that a 100×100 mile square of Southwest Desert theoretically receives enough sun to generate electricity …

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