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Investing in Alternative Energy with PBW

by Ben Engebreth, New York City on 09.29.05
Science & Technology (alternative energy)

wind_invest.jpgWe touched on it briefly here, but I think it's worth highlighting the relatively new Exchange-traded Fund with the ticker PBW that tracks the ^ECO index, also know as The WilderHill Clean Energy Index. As the name implies, the index and it's ETF allow you to buy into a portfolio of companies that are pursuing clean energy development. It's the easiest way I've seen (just purchase PBW through your brokerage) to date to get good exposure to a broad array of technologies that the TreeHugger mentality supports. Companies in the fund include Evergreen Solar, Distributed Energy Sys, Ballard Power Systems, Kyocera Corp Adr, and 30+ others. The full list is here. Anyone have any thoughts on the other companies?

Comments (3)

I don't think that Kyocera really derives that much of their revenue from their solar biz, percentage-wise.

Capstone makes little microturbine gensets usually run on natural gas (but not infrequently on landfill or digester gas, and they're hyper-efficient, so let's give them a pass.)

ECD is Uni-Solar, mostly, and some fuel cell and hydrogen storage, that's a pure play. Same for Evergreen Solar.

Magnetek makes inverters, I think a big part of their business is solar...

Ormat = turbines for geothermal generators. Growth business, some environmental complaints, but almost definitely a net winner.

Echelon is really more of a "smart grid" / distributed generation company, and while much of that is clean energy, it's certainly not necessarily so...

Maxwell technologies is an electronic components manufacturer, probably best known for their ultracapcitors, which could be a hybrid car enabling technology, work into wind power controls, etc., but they're mostly a plain-vanilla electronics component manufacturer there....really, same thing for American Power Conversion (perhaps best known for their desktop computer backup batteries, and International Rectifier.)

FCE and Plug Power are pure-play fuel cell companies, but Praxair is just an industrial gas supplier. Hydrogen is probably pretty incidental to them as compared with welding gases (and possibly medical gases - O2 and the like.) Same for Air Products...both are growing their H2 iz aggressively, but I don't know about calling htem clean energy companies.

jump to top WOV says:

I was a Ballard Power Systems investor twice across 3 years. The company has very interesting technology; however it is a very poor investment. There are a few reasons for this:

  • It has been losing money for 10+ years, which means that the common stock keeps depreciating due to recapitalizations,
  • Its technology requires a national infrastructure of hydrogen storage to be useful,
  • some of the major automakers have been reluctant to work with a single fuel-cell provider, fearing vendor lockin, and
  • hybrid technology engines have seized the industry momentum and popular imagination. All the investment dollars that might have gone to fuel cells are going to hybrids instead.

In short, don't put a dollar into Ballard if you can help it.

jump to top Anonymous says:

I like PBW. I invest in it myself. I wrote an article on investing in alternative energy at my blog site. Please check it out! Let me know what you think.

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