Indian mainstream research companies keep coming out with pages and pages of useless research on Indian solar power. Most of its value is not worth the paper it is written on with mindless reams of useless statistics and projections . This time CARE ratings has come out saying that solar power will reach grid parity by 2017 . Don’t know how they have come out with this magical number just as Crisil has come with a magic number as well.
However India’s biggest capital good equipment company BHEL owned by the government is plannning a $500 million investment to build a solar cell factory in at Sakoli which is part Union heavy industries minister Praful Patel’s constituency Bhandara.Talk about how dumb you can get. BHEL hardly has too much expertise in the solar panel industry and with solar cells in massive oversupply,it is almost sure to lose money. However that is how things work with Indian government companies where investment is made at the whims of ministers rather than rationality and business sense.BHEL is currently trading at one of the lowest valuations in its 10 year history and its not a big wonder why. The company has benefited in the past as did other machinery and engineering companies from an infrastructure invesment boom. However those glory days are over for the company as it faces competition from the Chinese companies and decreasing orders flow. Praful Patel the minister has already spent a few years in the airline ministry presiding over the conversion of the state owned carrier Air India ino a basket case. Now its the turn of BHEL to be turned into a basket case as well.
Updated: 7/06/2016 Japanese Solar Panel companies Sharp, Kyocera, Panasonic-Sanyo, Mitsubishi were the top solar panel producers in the world. Solar Energy in Japan has a long future dating back to 1994 when the government introduced capital subsidies to boost solar energy installations on rooftops. Till 2004, Japan was the largest solar market in the world […]
However I think that with the prices going down by such a lot , demand elasticity is rapidly picking up leading First Solar to unexpectedly start its closed German plants. With most sell side analysts giving up the industry for dead, volumes dying down and a sense of doom existing ,its time to build positions here as the major solar companies like Trina,Yingli continue to grow volumes by 30-50% .
While thousands of small solar companies in the world have gone / are going bust on account of massive industry oversupply and crashed solar panel prices, huge state owned Chinese conglomerates / quasi government companies are strengthening their position in the industry. There have been large number of bankruptcies in the West including such stalwarts […]
Note the market for water heaters in India is around $200 million annually and solar water heaters have managed to capture more than 30% of the market showing that solar water heaters are now a part of the mainstream. Note many solar products are starting to become more mainstream as their price competitiveness increases every year. Solar Panels which are the most widely used solar product has seen the price come down by almost 80% in the last few years .