Internet giant Google has invested more than $400 million in clean energy.
Tuesday morning, Google announced on its blog it’s providing $55 million for part of the construction of a 1.5 GW wind farm that is being built by Terra-Gen Power in Southern California’s Mojave Desert. Google’s financing will go toward a 102 MW section of the Alta Wind Energy Center, and Citibank has underwritten the equity for a major chunk of the rest.
Denmark invests 3.1% of its gross domestic product in clean energy technologies, the highest in the world.
The U.S. spends $45 billion a year on clean technologies, with those investments growing by 28 percent a year since 2008. But Denmark, which spends $9.4 billion a year on renewable energy and energy efficiency, is the world leader when clean-tech investment is taken as a percentage of gross domestic product; Denmark’s clean-tech investments equal 3.1 percent of GDP. Using that measure, China ranks second, spending 1.4 percent of GDP on clean tech.
A Berkeley National Laboratory study reveals that rooftop solar panels increase home resale values.
The analysis found homes with solar power systems sold for a premium over comparable homes without PV systems. These average sales price premiums were comparable to the initial outlay invested by the home owner, who also benefited from the electricity benefited from the rooftop solar array prior to sale.
Low natural gas prices and cuts in European subsidies have caused investment in renewable energy to fall by 34%, the lowest in two years.
Money flowing into the industry through asset finance, share sales, venture capital and private equity fell more than a third to $31.1 billion in the first three months of the year from a record $47.1 billion in the fourth quarter of 2010, the London-based researcher said today in a statement.
Countries including Germany and Spain have announced reductions in the guaranteed prices that they pay for electricity from renewable sources while in the U.K. the government is reviewing the rates. Gas in the U.S. in September fell to its lowest price since 2002 amid a glut in production.
In this age of spending cuts, alternative energy companies are finding that their federal subsidies are disappearing.
Mr. Nelson said, for instance, that solar energy provides less than 1 percent of all the energy in the world, but accounts for around 50 percent of government renewable energy financing. The problem, he argued, is that the government is backing technologies that are too expensive or inefficient to be widely adopted. That, he said, creates a sinkhole for government dollars.
The demand for ecologically-friendly buildings is not as affected by the recession as more conventional real estate.
“Owners of green properties should generally outperform — or at least minimize their losses — relative to less sustainable properties, while achieving other social or company goals,” it said.
Countries like the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia are funding research into renewable energy technologies.
They are aggressively pouring billions of dollars made in the oil fields into new green technologies. They are establishing billion-dollar clean-technology investment funds. And they are putting millions of dollars behind research projects at universities from California to Boston to London, and setting up green research parks at home.
There seems to be bipartisan support to wean the United States from its dependence on foreign oil by promoting alternative energy. Alternative energy is a growing category of mutual funds.
Even though alternative energy is a relative new fund category, the industry itself is quite vast. It encompasses the obvious, like solar panel makers and wind farm operators, but it also includes software designers working on “smart” power grids and even utilities that generate megawatts from hydro or geothermal assets. Alternative-energy stocks range from behemoths like General Electric (GE), which competes in the water and power sectors, to American Superconductor (AMSC: 16.45, +0.46, +2.87%), a small manufacturer of high-temperature superconductor wires that can carry 10 times the electricity of traditional cables.
Merrill Lynch’s Steven Milunovich is predicting that the current information technology age will give way to clean technology.
Noting technology revolutions occur about every 50 years, the Merrill report forecasts the current IT-centric age should give way to clean tech as the dominant technology, as the energy infrastructure moves to renewables. While acknowledging there are funding challenges in the current economy, Merrill predicts an acceleration in clean tech activity in 2010-11 after the funding issues are addressed.
Among Business Journal’s list of the top ten fastest growing companies from 2005 to 2007, half are renewable energy companies.
“I think you’re going to see growth accelerate,” said Leonard Devanna, president of Jadoo Power Systems Inc. in Folsom. “Many technologies are just now becoming feasible. Investors are now anticipating greater opportunities and putting greater funding into clean-tech companies.”
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