Don’t bother investing in climate change - yet
Kathryn Cooper
The Sunday Times - July 6, 2008
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One of the most popular stocks this year with private investors, alongside big boys such as Halifax Bank of Scotland and Barclays, has been a minnow called Tanfield.
The electric vehicle manufacturer, listed on the Alternative Investment Market (Aim), has regularly appeared in the top ten buys at stockbroker TD Waterhouse over the past year.
Easy to see why it has captured the imagination. In a world where the soaring price of oil, which topped $146 a barrel on Thursday, is forcing growing numbers of us to leave our gas guzzlers at home, the world’s largest manufacturer of commercial electric vehicles would seem like an exciting prospect.
Except that its shares collapsed 80% last Tuesday after a big profits warning, having already slumped 60% the week before. Investors who bought into the former stock market darling near its peak of 203.5p about a year ago will be ruing the day — the shares closed at just 4.86p on Friday.
There are some company-specific issues, including poor standards of disclosure and a management ability to burn cash, but the pain is being mirrored across the clean-energy sector.
With everyone from Brad Pitt to Danny DeVito championing the benefits of solar panels, you’d think solar stocks would have been a good investment but you’d be wrong. The solar component of the HSBC Climate Change index has fallen a punishing 50% since its highs in November 2007.
Virgin’s Climate Change fund, launched by the ever opportunistic Richard Branson to great fanfare at the start of the year, has got off to a dispiriting start, down nearly 10% over the past three months compared with a drop of 7% in its benchmark index.
So why, when the number of bets on oil hitting $200 a barrel in the next month has doubled, is alternative energy proving to be such a disappointment?
The problem, say analysts, is that nascent technology such as this is still more dependent on news about government subsidies than the soaring price of crude. And with countries scaling back in the wake of the credit crunch and the global economic downturn, the short-term outlook is not good.
Germany is the biggest market for solar, accounting for nearly half of world demand, but its growth from 44MW in 2000 to 959MW today is almost entirely down to government incentives rather than its sunny climate, and it will cut subsidies by 7% next year. Last week there were also rumours that Spanish subsidies would not be as generous as hoped.
Solar cell producers are also hampered by the high cost of their raw material, silicon. Jenny Chase, lead solar analyst at consultancy New Energy Finance, reckons it will be four to five years before the sector will make money for investors. So if you want to make a quick buck, forget it.
This is not a bet on climate change at all, it’s a bet on new technology, but it seems from Tanfield’s popularity that investors haven’t learnt the lessons of the crash in 2000.
Canny Richard Branson knows this too, which is why his fund capitalises on the climate-change hype without really giving you access to much climate-change technology. Only 10% of the scheme is in innovative but highly volatile companies — such as Plantic Technologies — that are genuinely supplying alternative energies.
Plantic has developed a pioneering alternative to conventional plastics, derived from non-GM corn, which is already used by M&S.
Most of the fund is in household names that you or I would hardly consider alternative, such as BG Group, but which are considered “best in class” when it comes to green practices. Which just goes to show how hard it is to make a genuine investment case for clean energy.
And Branson also charges you a hefty annual charge of 1.75% a year for the privilege plus a performance fee of 20% of excess returns.
There are of course bright spots in the climate-change sector. Wind power is expected to reach ‘grid parity’ — where the cost is much the same as more traditional power sources — in just over a decade, according to research by power firm Eon.
However, its development is being hampered by a shortage of wind turbines, which is why firms such as Vestas are trading on lofty valuations of around 49 times earnings — hardly a great investment proposition.
Aside from Tanfield, electric vehicles are also seen as a viable solution, but they are hampered by a shortage of batteries.
And HSBC’s investment banking arm has called energy efficiency an “invisible powerhouse” — it is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to cut carbon emissions, but has been left behind in the rush to capitalise on far sexier wind, wave and solar power.
Firms such as Impala Platinum and MMC Norilsk Nickel are set to benefit from the more pedestrian but probably more profitable task of improving the efficiency of existing technology.
Even then, I would be prepared to hang around for a least a decade. Sounds like a long time, but it’s coming up for 10 years since the tech bubble burst.
Only a handful of firms such as Arm Holdings, Invensys and Sage have survived the carnage and for investors who have stayed the distance it has been a very rocky ride.
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