Jeffrey McLarty

I specifically watch the advertisements on TED, because the companies sponsoring this stuff, deserve my eyeballs for a few extra seconds. Watch this video.

Buffet was in London, Ontario…I was like hours away from the man…anyway, he spoke, and somebody took notes.  These are the notes.

I can’t for the life of me own a stock where the PEs are higher than the temperature of the energy source they are trying to harvest from. Solar stocks are in the stratosphere, I thought about buying FSLR and writing the calls, but I don’t quite want $27.5K dedicated to one position….nor the downside.

That leads me to thinking about the companies who will benefit from Solar.

During the tech boom, we all poured money into innovation, and it’s why the internet runs so smoothly today. Without the fiber optic cable all the big boys paid to lay with share holder money, well, I might not be blogging right now. Most of the guys that did the leg work to set up the networks had major problems reaping the revenue when they commoditized their product. Turns out, some of them went bankrupt, and since you can’t pull up already laid cable the bankrupt companies were sold off by banks for pennies on the dollar.

Same thing is likely starting now, we’re pouring money into solar stocks, and the innovation from the money will eventually lead to grid parity solar energy prices.

So when this grid parity happens - who wins? That’s a million dollar question we got a little time to think about.

Anybody want to discuss? Any ideas? I’m looking for names who are going to install these products and improve margins as they sell un-used energy back to the grid.

I was just chatting with Robert Creighton, founder of WindLift Engine Company.  He’s looking for engineers and funding to get his wind kite power solution, off the ground .  He tells me that Larry Page has spent $40M investing in the space, and there are two other companies to watch - KiteGen and SkySails out of Italy and Germany.  Robert has two 8 kW prototypes and has sunk a quarter of a million into his business already.

He’ll be at CleanTech, in Boston, for the start of June.  Since Ariel Mutual funds is being dumb, I might go down and check out his work and the rest of the conference.

Check out 30 seconds into this video.