investing

Investment rushes into wind, but can we make it last?

By Yael Borofsky and Jesse Jenkins, originally posted at the Breakthrough Institute “The money is coming back” That’s what Ethan Zindler, head of New Energy Finance Ltd., proclaimed to the Wall Street Journal in response to emerging evidence that the government’s $3 billion dollar cash grant renewable energy stimulus program is successfully incentivizing private investment […]

U.N. climate chief: $300B needed each year in global climate fight

Yvo de BoerThe global community should be investing $300 billion annually to combat global warming, according to U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer. De Boer, the executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, says the world needs to be spending $100 billion annually to help vulnerable communities adapt to the impacts of climate […]

Boost innovation investments to make Waxman-Markey bill a game-changer

Advocates of regulatory environmentalism dominated the spin wars last month when the monumental American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES) — aka the carbon cap-and-trade bill assembled by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.) — passed out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Climate politics “realists” lauded “historic action” (in […]

Green sector creates 50 percent of new jobs

…in Ireland. This is great news for the people of Ireland. But we need to create those jobs in the U.S. too. In Ireland, a country of four million, 10,000 “green” jobs were created in the last three months in organic farming, energy efficient construction, electric cars, and other green industries. With US GDP falling […]

You can’t build a new foundation with dirty energy

Building a new foundation requires a lot of heavy machinery. Bulldozers to clear the land, extractors to dig the foundation, concrete-mixers to pour the cement, and trucks to haul the raw materials. So perhaps it’s appropriate that Jim Owens, the CEO of Caterpillar will be at the White House tomorrow for the first meeting of […]

First quarter cleantech VC funding hits $1 billion — green stimulus funds soar to $400 billion

Clean tech venture capital funding in the first quarter of 2009 hit $1 billion, according to “findings released today by the Cleantech Group in cooperation with Deloitte.” For the authors of the findings, the headline news was global cleantech VC funding “dropped 41 percent during 1Q09, compared to the previous quarter.” But that $1 billion […]

First DOE loan guarantee goes to … a solar manufacturer

The Department of Energy announced on Friday that the first energy loan guarantee authorized by the 2005 (!) Energy Policy Act went to a plant that manufactures solar panels: Energy Secretary Steven Chu today offered a $535 million loan guarantee for Solyndra, Inc. to support the company’s construction of a commercial-scale manufacturing plant for its […]

Nukes may become troubled assets, ruin credit ratings

Part 1 presented a new study that puts the generation costs for power from new nuclear plants at from 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour -- triple current U.S. electricity rates!

Nuclear plants with such incredibly expensive electricity and "out of control" capital costs, as Time put it, obviously create large risks for utilities, their investors, and, ultimately taxpayers. Congress extended huge loan guarantees to new nukes in 2005, and the American people will be stuck with another huge bill if those plants join the growing rank of troubled assets.

The risk to utilities who start down the new nuke path is also great. A June 2008 report [PDF] by Moody's Investor Services Global Credit Research, "New Nuclear Generating Capacity: Potential Credit Implications for U.S. Investor Owned Utilities" (PR here [PDF]), warned that "nuclear plant construction poses risks to credit metrics, ratings," concluding:

The cost and complexity of building a new nuclear power plant could weaken the credit metrics of an electric utility and potentially pressure its credit ratings several years into the project, according to a new report from Moody's Investors Service ...

Moody's suggests that a utility that builds a new nuclear power plant may experience an approximately 25% to 30% deterioration in cash-flow-related credit metrics.

And this would likely result in a sharp downgrading of the utility's credit rating.

The application by Florida Power & Light for a large nuclear plant came in at a stunning $12 to $18 billion, and the utility concedes that new reactors present "unique risks and uncertainties," with "every six-month delay adding as much as $500 million in interest costs."

The report Climate Progress published this week, Business Risks and Costs of New Nuclear Power [PDF] by power-plant cost expert Craig Severance, has an extended discussion of the business risks to utilities and hence investors:

Stimulus spending going to roads?

Reason to worry about the stimulus bill: Missouri’s plan to spend $750 million in federal money on highways and nothing on mass transit in St. Louis doesn’t square with President-elect Barack Obama’s vision for a revolutionary re-engineering of the nation’s infrastructure. Utah would pour 87 percent of the funds it may receive in a new […]