No matter what data one presents to hardline proponents of solar energy, they choose to bury their heads in the sand and hope it isn’t so. Today Spiegel presents data that are so striking that they could even jolt those caught deepest in fantasy back to reality.
Online Spiegel has an article today dubbed: Market Losers: These German Companies Destroyed The Most Capital. It lists the top capital destroyers of 2014. I had a feeling I’d find find maybe one or two solar companies, but it turns out that it’s actually far worse than I thought. Four of the top 12 are solar companies!
The number one German capital destroyer of 2014, Spiegel writes, was Solarworld. “The company lost almost 82 percent of its value. Since 2010 the share price has gone in the cellar, falling 99.5 percent, …”
Not only Solarwold made it on the list of the Top German Destroyers Of Capital, but so did 3 other solar technology companies. Brandenburg-based Aleo Solar took 6th place, losing 57 percent of its value in 2014.
The solar technology bloodbath was extended by 1999-founded Phoenix Solar, which lost 96% of its value last year, Spiegel writes. The company took 9th place.
Solar technology company SMA took 12th place on the list of the top German capital destroyers. No industry comes close to destroying the amount of capital that the solar industry wiped out last year. The big losers are from the solar industry, hands down.
The capital destruction that is Germany’s highly ballyhooed “Energiewende” (transition to renewable energy) does not end in the solar sector, but extends to the conventional power companies, who are reeling from the impacts of the subsidized renewable energies. Energy giants RWE and E.on come in at 35th and 43rd place respectively.
One senses that Germany’s entire energy industry is breaking up and falling to pieces.
It is truly mind-boggling how anyone can say solar energies are the future – unless you’re an insolvency administrator, that is.
Well, the collapse of Solar industry has been going on since 2008, notable victims e.g. Q-Cells (RIP) and Conergy (RIP); Ersol got bought by Bosch, Bosch later closed down its solar business, maybe sold it to someone else for a penny.
Sharp was once the biggest maker of solar cells, don’t know if that’s still the case, but their shares know only one way since 2000, and that is down.
I live in a relatively small village on the south coast of England. In the last three weeks an enormous solar farm has been installed over previously agriculturally productive land.
I stopped by and asked what was going on.
Not one of the installing workers would speak to me. Then I met the owner of the land and I asked him why he was installing solar on valuable farm-land.
The answer was most revealing.
“I can get more money from the Government from this installation than I can get from farming the land. And the Government is paying over 65% of the installation costs. I can’t lose!”
Something, somewhere is very, very wrong.
Steve:
look out, shortly sod will be posting claiming that the 65% subsidy is non existent, and the high feed-in price can’t be true because solar is so cheap.
Well, it is cheap to those getting subsidised.
Something is also right; the economy. Only an affluent society can allow itself such waste. Not that this makes the UK energy policy less deplorable, of course.
So, the moral is that only economical disaster can cure this evil? Let us hope not.
Capital destroyers or government subsidy destroyers … any private equity investors losing money in these boondoggles deserves to.
German daily “Die Welt” has got a better graph of this “analysis”:
http://www.welt.de/finanzen/article138823381/Diese-Firmen-sind-die-groessten-Geldvernichter.html
What they are doing (it is a stock-holder association) is simple: They just look at stock loss over 1 year, 3 years and 5 years timespans.
This is interesting when you are buying stocks, but utterly useless for an analysis of the energy sector.
To give an example: i notice today, that the 100€ which i gave as a loan to a friend of mine will never come back. this would give me “100% loss” and make me the “biggest money burner” among banks (as the percentage does not tell you anything about the billions that real banks lose).
Solarworld got a good start 2015, as the news wrote these days:
http://www.n-tv.de/wirtschaft/Solarbranche-legt-wechselhafte-Zahlen-vor-article14785256.html
I like your desperate clutching at straws. Perhaps you could use them as an energy source!
Straw won’t keep you warm if you wet yourself whenever you hear a scary story.
CO2 will, by virtue of its mighty 6.5 micron absorption band. Just breathe heavily and ye shall be warmed.
Lame excuse.
And charting only from the start of the year is classic chartmanship: Deception by omission or perspective of presentation.
But even that doesn’t hide the 20% dive in price in the 3 months since the start of the year.
5 years ago, the price of SMA shares was around €100; now it’s below €12.
Readers of the n-tv article only have to click on the link and see that Solarworld also bombed. A year ago the price was nearly €40; now it’s less than €14.
But hey; solar is a long-term “investment”, isn’t it. So what was the price in 2008? Was it perhaps over €7300? (Seven thousand, three hundred)? And it crashed to only around €2000 throughout 2009. Did you buy a lot of shares then? Well, even if you bought in 10 years ago, it’d have cost €1000. Any profit would have had to have been from sales before the middle of 2011 because the share price has been falling below €1000 since then.
Just another click away: Solarworld erneut auf Platz eins — Aktionärsverein prangert “Geldvernichter” an
It looks like divestment of solar instead of coal, oil and gas. Despite the favoured industry status of the unreliables.
Given the recent history of the solar industry in Spain, the likelihood of its succeeding in a more northerly country has to be minimal at best – as this shows. I rather applaud the idea of a league table of “capital destroyers” though – a refreshing change from (and counterbalance to) “rich lists”!
how anyone can say solar energies are the future – unless you’re an insolvency administrator, that is. –
Great piece of phraseology
@Stephen Richards.
Thank you for that phrase. I must remember it for future use!