The View from REFF
Today we’re attending the Renewable Energy Financing Forum sponsored by ACORE in NY. Thus far, there have been two very interesting sessions on Biomass/biofuels and Solar (PV). The panels have been informative, a mix of executives from established companies in the segments and investors (mostly public market.)
In his opening remarks this morning, Michael Eckhart, the President of ACORE, walked through the various renewable resources and he singled out geothermal as being the ONLY renewable capable of displacing coal baseload generation. Curiously, there is not a geothermal session in this conference and we here from the Geothermal Energy Association, Geothermal Resources Council, or even a single geothermal industry attendee from the Geothermal Financing Workshops over the past year. This is a missed opportunity.
A few key points from this morning’s session were:
- 10% of venture capital investments in 2006 were in renewable energy
- 1.6B people do not have access to electricity (perhaps we ought to solve the power divide too…)
- 20% of US corn output is used to make ethanol, that is predicted to rise to 30% by 2010
- 2/3 of the cost of ethanol in the US is due to fuel stock (corn) prices
- Aggregate market capitalization for US solar companies has increased from $1B in 2004 to $67.3B now
- It takes between 2-4 years of electricity production of a solar cell to offset it’s electrical and environmental impact of manufacture
- Refined silicon costs on the spot market have increased from $50/kg two years ago to over $250/kg now. Long term contracts can be had for $70/kg. The cost of Si is forecast to decrease to $40/kg over the next 2 years.
Those are facts we found interesting, we’ll share more on the afternoon’s sessions in future entries.
