More Misguided Information on Solar Energy

In Greenworldinvestor.com we have repeatedly pointed out various useless and shallow research and media reports which try to cast solar energy in a bad light. We have been surprised how top organizations and media outlets have come out with such badly written and researched articles saying that solar energy is expensive, does not work and is a fad. Street.com and MSNBC.com are the latest organizations trying to rake up readership by coming out with a few facts about how solar panel stocks and the products don’t work. The relationship that solar panels do not work and that is making the stocks perform badly is totally false. Solar panels do work and solar energy is not a fad anymore. To cite a couple of instances of solar panels not working is stupidity at best and paid propaganda at worst.

Street.com has come out with exactly 3 instances of solar panels not working and painted the whole solar energy industry as being a sham. How can 3 instances make an industry look bad when millions of installations happened last year. This is like saying that Apple makes very bad products if 3 iPad minis do not work. Note around 150 million solar panels were installed last year (my estimate) and taking a sample of 100 panels don’t work is stupidity on a colossal scale. In Australia 1 million homes are going to have installed solar panels on their roofs by the end of 2012. If solar panels were such a bad product, then I do not think the figure would have even reached 100,000 irrespective of the subsidy. By the way in Germany subsidies are given on the electricity generated by the solar panels and not on their cost. So if hundreds of thousands of German would not have installed solar panels if they did not work.

So what Street.com is saying is that if 2-3 products fail then the industry is failing. This would make all the industries globally unsuccessful. Note Solar Panels are being not only being sold on subsidies but now have become so cheap that even the poorest people in remote Indian hinterlands are buying it to power their homes. The costs of solar panels thanks to Chinese overcapacity have fallen so dramatically that grid price parity has been reached in a number of places already (Brazil, Italy, Hawaii etc.). The Street.com is useless drivel and won’t affect the performance of solar panels industry. Note the author of the article Bill Gunderson (who is a professional manager and the president of Gunderson Capital Mgt. Inc.) seems very ill informed about the global solar panel industry. It is pathetic how top media outlets routinely put out misinformed opinions and articles.

Read About Chinese Solar Panels Review.

Biggest Solar Off Grid Market in Unlikeliest of Places

Note the world’s largest off grid market is now the Exhibition Road market in Bihar which is one of India’s most backward and poor states. The market has been created by free market economics as the Indian Government gives subsidies almost entirely for the grid connected large solar farms. The off grid solar market has been ignored by the wise Indian policy makers as large solar projects fail to get financial closure and cost hundreds of crores in subsidies (Read what India Solar Energy needs below). Note this new solar panel market is not without its problems as cheap and sub standard solar panels are winning marketshare from established quality solar panels brands. These solar panels are much cheaper as they provide much lesser wattage, have non-existent warranty and quality. However they manage to outsell as India is a highly price conscious market where the initial cost is a major decisive factor in buying.

Australia exploiting cheap Chinese solar panels to the hilt

Australia has seen a big increase in solar panel installations due to generous subsidies given by individual states in Australia, like New South Wales and others. Unlike other parts of the world where solar installations have started with large solar farms; residential rooftop installations have powered Solar Energy in Australia. According to the Australian Clean Energy Regulator more than 800,000 Australian homes have installed solar energy with the overall capacity from solar energy now at 2 GW. Despite falling subsidies from the Government, the crash in solar system prices in Australia has meant that the growth is not going to stop any time soon. The reason for the sharply lower solar panel prices (now 70c/watt wholesale price in China from $4/watt in 2008) is the massive capacity expansion and cost reduction by Chinese solar panel companies.

Street.com

As one solar company after another goes out of business, here is what investors do not know and promoters will not tell you: Solar panels do not work that well. It is not a surprise that First Solar’s panels failed. It is surprising anyone found out. As we shall see. Sometimes not at all. But for several years, most solar systems, big and small, were so heavily subsidized, they were practically free. So lots of people did not really care.

Not enough to check the output of their systems. The few who did often had a big surprise

Solar systems fail in a lot of different ways.