Stocks and Sectors

John Clark submits:

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Oilprice.com submits:

By Darrell Delamaide

A new stimulus grant of $100 million from the US Department of Energy that includes support for grid-scale energy storage projects is the latest sign of the growing need to find ways of storing energy from electricity production.

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Stockerblog submits:

If you are looking for a green utility, you need look no further than Hawaiian Electric Industries Inc. (HE), which gets its electricity from a wide range of green and environmentally conscious sources, including wind, solar, photovoltaic, geothermal, wave, hydroelectric, municipal waste, and other biofuels. They even use sugarcane waste as a source of fuel. If automobiles can be run on chocolate, then electrical generators can certainly be run on sugarcane.

Hawaian Electric pays a strong 6% yield, paying about $115 million in dividends, which are well covered by the operating cash flow of $284 million. The company carries a forward price to earnings ratio of 11.7. Last month, the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission approved the cost recovery of the company’s new biodiesel-fuel generating plant at Campbell Industrial Park, which should increase utility revenues by 1%.

For investors who like green companies, it might be worth taking a closer look at Hawaiian Electric. If you like stocks with high yields, you should check out the free list of high yielding utilities at WallStreetNewsNetwork.com, that can be downloaded, changed, and sorted.

Disclosure: Author does not own the above stock.

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Ocean Power Technologies, Inc. (OPTT)

F3Q10 (Qtr End 01/31/10) Earnings Call

March 12, 2010 10:00 am ET

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Pall Corporation (PLL)

F2Q10 (Qtr End 01/31/10) Earnings Call

March 12, 2010 8:30 am ET

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David Gross submits:

The DoE recently released its Monthly Energy Review for November, and its preliminary numbers showed wind surpassing 2% of total production. However, total output from wind turbines dropped slightly from the previous month, going from 5.802 billion kWh in October to 5.678 billion kWh in November. On a year-over-year basis, it increased 25% from 4.538 billion kWh in November 2008.

The main reason wind hit 2.01% in November was a reduction in generation from all sources, with total electricity demand coming in at just 283 billion kWh, down nearly 10% year-over-year from 309 billion in November 2008. This was a sharper drop than we saw in October, when year-over-year demand fell 4%, and wind hit its previous monthly record of 1.89% of total generation. For the first 11 months of 2009, wind produced 1.66% of total U.S. Electricity, up from 1.29% for all of calendar 2008.

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Market Folly submits:

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Greentech Media submits:

by Stephen Munro

Regulators and utilities in North Carolina agree that more information needs to be shared about smart-grid deployment in the state, but they’re not yet in sync on what information that should be.

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Dividend Inc. submits:

As we have indicated in our February 26th posting,

As a sector, the water utilities are the most undervalued in our Dividend Achiever Watch List.

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John Petersen submits:

The electric power system in the U.S. is dirty, antiquated, stupid, unstable, and a security nightmare. After years of discussion and debate, consensus now holds that the generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure will need hundreds of billions in new investment to reduce emissions, improve reliability, minimize waste and inefficiency, improve security, and facilitate the integration of wind, solar and other emerging alternative energy technologies.

Commonly cited capital spending estimates range from $200 billion globally by 2015 to $2 trillion overall. In his November 2008 report, "The Sixth Industrial Revolution: The Coming of Cleantech," Merrill Lynch strategist Steven Millunovich observed that cleantech markets will dwarf IT to the tune of two orders of magnitude. While there’s plenty of room to debate how the future will unfold, there’s little question that we’re watching the emergence of an investment mega-trend that will endure for decades.

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