Clean Technology consists of a wide range of industries including solar, wind energy, smart grids, LEDs and biofuels. The industry stands to benefit from powerful secular trends in favor of more efficient use of resources with lower carbon footprints.
Demand for clean technology is expected to be driven by depleting hydrocarbons, environmental concerns and energy cost arbitrages and should continue to drive further investments.
Following are some insights from Jefferies to help investors identify opportunities as well as potential pitfalls in the clean technology sector.
Asset Plays vs. New Technologies
It is critical to distinguish between companies that are focused on building productive assets, and companies that have "asset light" strategies supported by proprietary technologies and multiple partnerships. The former can be expected to burn cash until the next projected plant expansion is no longer supported by reinvestment economics; the latter can be expected to generate high free cash flows, with much of the project risk carried by other parties.
Regulatory Incentives
As a general rule, regulatory initiatives should be the main driver for relative performance in the sector, much as it is for many other sectors of the economy. The most-often cited risk factors including Credit market risk, feedstock prices, end-customer adoption rates, disruptive technologies can often be addressed by the appropriate incentive program.
On the other hand, an uncertainty in regulatory direction could act as a roadblock for breakthrough inventions, new process yields and efficiency levels, a judicious capital structure, favorable arbitrage economics, and even significant partnerships.
Capex Costs
The brokerage said it is critical to look at cost per unit of energy produced over the lifetime of the project over per megawatt Capex costs particularly in the wind and solar. This is especially the case in the wind where there are significant differences in costs per kwh between different turbines.
The focus should be on the price of electricity to end users and whether companies are providing viable alternatives to electricity base load or maximizing electricity generation or transportation fuel (diesel or gasoline).
Elevated Commodity Prices and New Technologies
There are instances that regulatory decisions contributed to the commodity landscape, and volatile commodity prices eventually prompted a policy response. For example, inexpensive corn encouraged biofuel subsidies, and now biofuel subsidies are under threat due to elevated corn prices. The sweet spot occurs when regulatory initiatives are stymied by a technical bottleneck which only one or a handful of companies are capable of solving.
Funding
While it is easy to be seduced by new technologies, funding arrangements can vary considerably due to the specific characteristics of a project, such as the capital intensity or the ongoing financial commitments required for the feed-in tariff subsidy model. So, the investors should review both the immediate capital cost of deployment of a new technology as well as the long-term cash flows and liabilities that can be inherent in deployment.