India has around 300,000 Telecom Towers around the country , a large portion of which is not connected to the electricity grid.Another large portion does not have access to reliable electricity implying they have to install backup power systems in order to run without interruptions.Diesel Generators have been the choice of telecom operators despite their high carbon imprint.This is because of the ease of buying and installing diesel generators as well as the lower fuel costs as the government in India heavily subsidizes diesel.Note India’s Fossil Fuel Subsidies have led to hundreds of distortions in the economy.Corruption,Pilfering,Adulteration is carried out on a large scale due to government subsidies.In fact a senior government official was burnt alive by the Kerosene Mafia a direct outcome of this subsidy policy.But that is a separate issue.
Blackrock the Giant Asset Manger with $3.6 Trillions (yet it is Trillions) has decided to join hands with Irish Company NTR to form a new JV.The purpose of this JV will be to invest directly into cleantech assets and infrastructure.The JV will be a part of the Alternative Energy division of Blackrock which already has $110 billion in cleantech funds.Note NTR is an Irish firm with interest in waste management,ethanol,biomass energy and solar thermal energy.It recently ran into major problems as its subsidiary Tessera Energy faced major delays in implementing 2 Solar Thermal Plants in USA (Imperial Valley and Calico) despite getting US Govt approvals.Tessera problems had a dire effect on the parent company financials resulting in the selling of these 2 solar thermal projects.
India has been trying to build tidal power plants in order to take advantage of around 8 GW of potential tidal wave power capacity potential in India.Note Gujarat has been at the forefront of these efforts with most of the tidal power capacity Gulf of Cambay and Gulf of Kutch.While there have been reports of the go-ahead for these tidal energy plants,nothing concrete has come out of it .Note Tidal Energy is in a very immature stage compared to other forms of Renewable Energy like Solar,Wind and Biomass Energy.Tidal Energy like Wave Energy is still in the demo stage even in developed countries of the West where technology innovation is much higher.
A Clean Technology REIT is about to be launched which is going to invest in real estate which generates clean energy.The strategy is simple to invest in properties which have green energy power plants.Note Clean Tech Investing has yielded terrible results for public investors in the last couple of years.The failure of Copenhagen,Cancun Climate Meets and the Lehman crisis has led to a bloodbath for Green Investors.Don’t know how successful this strategy will be for I don’t know how much alpha a Clean Tech REIT can generate over a normal REIT.However the performance of DLR has been quite awesome over the last few years.
There exists a reasonable number of ETFs in the US Stock Market which are dedicated to Clean Technology.However the performance of these ETFs has been quite abysmal in the last 2-3 years as the Green Industry has faced impossibly tough times.While Solar Energy crashed in end 2008,Wind Stocks took a massive fall in 2010.Ethanol Stocks […]
France has had a rocky relationship with solar energy.Unlike other European countries France gets a huge amount of electricity from renewable sources namely nuclear energy.Its electricity prices are one of the lowest and it even exports electricity to neighbors.So the driver for increasing solar electricity is quite low in France compared to others like Spain and Italy.However France has seen a massive boom in solar installations in 2010 making it the 7th largest market in the world.France installed over 720 MW of solar in 2010 and faces a massive backlog of applications.The government got overwhelmed and called a sudden stop to all applications.The French government stupidly blamed Chinese solar panels for the solar deluge when it was its faulty solar Feed in Tariff Policy which was too generous.