Plug Power, a stationary fuel cell maker valued at just over $300 million, has just brought on a new interim CFO - David Waldek.

Tomorrow, the company reports Q4 and annual 2006, so recent executive departures do not augur well for these results. According to this Motley Fool entry;

"Public filings alone show that gross margins have continued to deteriorate all year long. As for operating and net margins, they remain so negative as to not be worth calculating."

Back in 2004, it was anticipated that their GENSYS system would cost below $1500 in 2007/8 - a price at which it could compete in the market without a government subsidy. Like many fuel cell companies, lower costs sadly remain on the horizon and a price breakthrough has yet to materialize.

So let's see what the results are like tomorrow . . .

Looked at crudely, the world's solar pv industry is mass manufacture in Germany, Japan, and to a lesser extent in China and the USA for module sales and installation in Germany, Japan and the USA. By and large, when you strip out China, most of the production tends to be for the domestic marketplace.

The wind industry I would argue is a lot more globalised.

Take today's news of 2 Big orders for Vestas and Repower Systems in Greece and Japan.

A Danish company selling to Greece and a German company selling to Japan. There's no equivalent kind of interplay going on the international solar scene on that scale.

An exception though might be the extraordinary size and success of Renewable Energy Corp from Norway - the world's biggest alternative energy company by market capitalisation.

A very informative article here about the effect of venture funding for clean energy technology companies.

Although venture funding for environmental technologies doubled in 2006 to $1.28 billion, this is still a fraction of what was raised through IPOs in 2006. Of course, stockmarkets and venture capitalists are not usually competitors. That's because VCs tend to get involved early on in a company's formation whereas the IPO is - quite often - the crowning glory of a company's history. So for successful firms, venture funding very frequently preceeds IPOs.

Take Trina Solar for example. As the article reports, Trina received the third largest venture financing - $40 million ahead of its initial public offering late in 2006. Since going public, a lot more money has been raised. The stock is now worth $240 million.

We should not take this as a given though. At the end of the dot-com crash, VC funds were sitting on a lot of cash with very few opportunities, whilst the IPO market took years to recover. If - as some believe - we are in an alternative energy bubble today - it is quite possible this will happen again and VCs will be a lot more powerful than they are today.

Interesting story in today's paper about how corn became hotter than oil. The premise for this boom is according to the article's lead in, is "... a high demand for a green substitute for petrol". I think it's actually much more the case of government incentives and subsidies boosting demand and hitting a biofuel supply wall. Agriculture can't ramp up production fast enough to hit mandated targets in Europe, America and Brazil. So for now, the price of biofuel can only one way - up.

What really caught my attention though was their short paragraph on Brazil - a country that is a major player in biofuels - specifically bioethanol - and whose production is just ahead of America. The difference for us is that their quoted companies are much harder to obtain information and trade on and so we don't hear about them much. Compared to say the USA, Brazil is heavily under-represented on the world's stockmarkets in biofuels. Right now, here at AEI we know of and have listed 3 Brazilian biofuel stocks;

i) Brasil Ecodiesel - unusually, a biodiesel company in sugar cane rich ethanol producing Brazil
ii) Cosan SA, a producer, cultivator and harvester of ethanol from sugarcane
iii) Sao Martinho, Brazil's biggest ethanol refiner

So is Brazilian biofuel a good long-term bet?

Some environmentalists have their doubts - understandably - about the potential destruction of natural virgin habitat to make way for increased Brazilian biofuel production. On the other hand, development economists laud biofuels as an opportunity for Brazil to finally get rich - the first developing country in world history to move up to developed world status on the back of agriculture. Whatever your views are, it seems hard not to foresee that more land in Brazil will be made available for biofuel production, because the price that these cash crops can fetch are going up and are forecast to stay high.

If I was to anticipate, my best guesstimate is that Brazil will prosper from biofuels for 10 more years. After that, it is quite possible that any number of technological breakthroughs may have been made in vehicle transport and brought into production to make conventional biofuels obsolete or at least a lot less relevant. These are in order of likelihood; plug-in hybrids, engines running on bio-engineered cellulosic biofuels or just possibly, fuel cells.

So 1st generation Brazilian biofuels are I would argue, a good short to medium term bet, but no more than that for now.

Evergreen Solar ought to be enjoying the solar boom going on right now. Yet last week's results are not going down too well.

With their string ribbon low silicon technology, they should be well-positioned to emerge as a front-runner supplier, given the current capacity constraints in high-grade silicon supply. And yet the curiosity is that high silicon prices have not driven demand to seek low or non-silicon solar sources like Evergreen's or thin-film / amorphous pv, made supposedly cheaper through a continuous manufacturing run.

So I would like to controversially suggest that the real vilain in this story - why solar prices aren't falling - is government; internationally, solar pv support by government has exceeded the benefits in investing in low or zero silicon-based alternatives that have all the potential to bring down solar prices.

A classic unintended consequence of government interference if ever there was one.

Novozymes, the biomass division of which concentrates on cellulosic biofuels, has two reasons to celebrate this week.

1) President Bush is coming for a visit to its Novozymes North American subsidiary plant in Franklinton on Thursday

2) Yesterday, the company announced that it had prevailed in a patent lawsuit against a rival.

My general view is, good for them and here's why.

Few doubt now that there will be serious competition between food and ethanol driving demand for the US's limited corn supply and its prices higher. The only way out of this has to be to extract more oil from the unutilised part of the corn plant (i.e. everything except the cob) and other biomass by the use of genetically engineered enzymes.

So enter Novozymes and President Bush's interest.

Because in this capability at least, Denmark's Novozymes can claim to be a world contender.

Suzlon Energy, it appears, will now have to try harder to win over Repower System's board for a takeover.

In an 11 page statement, Repower was a lot less than emphatic for Suzlon's superior offer, by choosing to embrace Areva's price as "fair" and saying nothing about that of Suzlon. I don't think this shows Repower in a very positive light.

But part of me understands why . . .

If you're a traditional German big government green (as most employees in German AEI firms are), knowing which company to side with could be a tough call. Do you support a French (+1) nuclear power company (-1) or an Indian (-1) Wind company (+1) to take over your firm, which by the way is very ambitious (-0.5) and doesn't have much time for the Sozialmarktwirtschaft (-1)?

I've said it here before, but the future of manufacturing wind turbines is definitely not in Germany. Suzlon is an ambitious company with a can do, will succeed ethos, backed up by a lot of tangible success. Viewed dispassionately, the wind industry would probably benefit more from a bigger market share for Suzlon. So looking at it rationally, some shareholders of Repower may well decide to take the Suzlon money and run, whatever the board does or doesn't say.

The core strength of many German companies remains in the engineering, client base and intellectual property. Manufacturing meanwhile is more easily replicated by the developing world at lower cost and at higher quailty all the time.

And no question, over the next few years, globalisation will accelerate all of these trends.

That's why opposing the Suzlon takeover for Repower smacks of a futile struggle against the inevitable future.

Renewable Energy Corp - has just posted an 89% improvement on Q4 to the previous year.

As per this same article, the company cited . . . both sales and earnings are primarily being driven by successfully implemented expansion projects and improved productivity', as well as favourable market conditions.

With a USD 12 Billion market cap., REC is by far the largest solar firm in the world.

When the solar boom comes to an end - as it must - there will be a flight to quality. And compared to some of the other players out there, REC would look like one of the most solid solar companies of all.

FuelCell Energy, a manufacturer of high temperature hydrogen fuel cells for clean electric power generation, has 2 distinguishing features as a fuel cell company;

i) They are firmly in the stationary power market from 250 KW to 3 MW
ii) They think hydrogen is far-off, so their fuel cells run on off the shelf fossil fuels like gas or even diesel and jet fuel

And whilst the company is loss-making according to an analyst at Ardour Capital . . . “If you're going to be in fuel cells . . . this is the only company you should be looking at right now.”

The fuel cell sector has not done well of late. But what has changed are rising government incentives which may at last herald better fortune. The Income Tax Credit was recently extended until the end of 2008 and some think it could run until 2016 when next renewed. Whilst I don't in principle agree with subsidies because of the opportunity costs they generate, it's clear that it is in the self-interest of alternative energy technologies which are not quite commercially viable to get them. This has generated quite a boom in the solar and wind industries. If the fuel cell sector did even half as well as those two, we would all take a lot more interest in the fuel cell industry very quickly.

Beacon Power, dropped 18% today on over $10 m of sales to finance ongoing operations, including the expected completion of Beacon's Smart Energy 25 flywheel development and the design of the first 20-megawatt frequency regulation power plant.

My general view is that flywheels are much closer to widespread commercial application than fuel cells, but that's not saying much. I was particularly intrigued to read earlier this year that research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories indicates that 10 MW of fast-responding flywheel energy could provide the grid with the equivalent energy of 20 MW or more of traditional slow-responding power plant energy.

I'd like to know what kind of slow-responding power plant they are referring to. A semi warmed-up combined cycle gas turbine can start up in 3 minutes, a coal station perhaps 12 hours. 20 MW though is a really decent amount of power - the highest quantity so far for high-tech energy storage.

You can't ignore the volatility that is so prevalent in the alternative energy sector.

Take today's biggest winner and loser for example.

Repower Systems AG, usually referred to by the media as just "Repower", jumped 27% today, because Suzlon Energy, an Indian wind turbine manufacturer, has just offered a 40% premium over Areva's buyout price for Repower - fixed on Jan. 19, the last trading day before Areva made its approach. . This is no question, an exciting story. Indian industrialisation has largely been ignored in the West, who have assumed that it is all about China, and India was all about call centres and software. With an economy of 1 billion people growing at 9% a year, we can expect to hear much more of India in the years to come.

Now the loser, Energy Conversion Devices, down 16%, because revenues came in $10 million lower than expected. According to this article, the company said that it does not expect to achieve sustainable profitability by the end of the year as previously projected, partly due to the longer-than-anticipated delay in securing additional funding for the company's emerging technologies.

To pick just one angle, the contrast between the two is really one of marture and developing technology. Repower and Suzlon represent off-the shelf profitable alternative energy technology which works. ECD's basic problem is that it is visionary - the technology is always beyond the horizon.

Econergy International, has just finalised the purchase of of a 50% stake in two hydropower stations in Bolivia from Duke Energy International.

Econergy sees itself as a carbon credit generation firm. So they've got to be pleased about this. Hydropower, after all, after the enormous amounts of cement to build the dams, operates and creates vast amounts of carbon-free electricity.

Let's take a closer look at the price too - $20 million for a 50% stake 147 MW. That works out at $242,000 for each of the 73.5 megawatts. I have to say, that looks very cheap. Building a hydro plant from scratch today would typically cost $3 million per installed megawatt. Could the world's hydro assets be substantially undervalued?

On the face of it, Econergy appears to have closed a good deal.

Aleo Solar can now point to new contracts with Gamesa and Endesa in Spain worth €15 million. This is impressive for a German solar firm which not normally associated with venturing outside of their cushy, high-subsidy home market.

What is crucial as well is that Aleo Solar have matched this demand for modules with a cell supply contract with Q-Cells that runs until 2012. For solar pv module manufacturers like Aleo, long-term silicon contracts are the key to ending silicon volatility.

By 2012, I suspect the price of silicon will have finally started to fall and they will have gently ridden out the worst part of the silicon storm.

No question who was the winning stock today - Solar2 AG up 33%. That is meant to be expressed as solar squared by the way - the Germans would call it "Solarhoch Zwei" - hence their homepage (no english I'm afraid) www.solarhoch2.de .

Since going public at EUR 3.90 per share near the top of the market on the 3rd of April last year, after it's initial bounce to just over EUR 5, it has had a pretty miserable time decending below 2 and pretty much staying there. According to the company's press section on the website, anonymous allegations were earlier made over the company's transations with Plambeck Neue Energien AG and it's subsidiaries. But since preliminary investigations were dropped on January 12th against board members, Mr Brikey and Mr Wind, this cloud has been lifted.

The company is unusual in the solar sector, because it provides solar pv and solar thermal systems.

Active Power closed down 12.12% on Friday - the worst performing AEI stock of the day. It appears that a central cause is that preliminary findings showed it backdated certain stock option grants, and that it expects to incur additional stock-based compensation charges.

And the article continues;

"... it has not been determined whether any such charges would require a restatement of prior financial statements".

This is a great shame for a company which produces the largest commercially available flywheels - which has enjoyed some success, as I blogged about here last August. And the fact that flywheels still have enormous potential in the hybrid vehicle market.

Green Plains Renewable Energy
has just closed up 11.75% on the day at 22.64.

The company is currently bouncing along between 20 and 30 since last August. Since getting a new Chairman late last month, fortunes could be on the up, as one of the smaller, often overlooked bioethanol corporations.

Well here's a thought; if I was the new Chairman of GPRE, I would immediately change the company name to just "Green Plains" from Green Plains Renewable Energy. In the age of the internet and information overload, any company name that includes more than 2 words and a widely applicable noun and adjective, is simply asking to be drowned out in all the white noise.

Trina Solar has just signed a $120m contract with a Korean polysilicon supplier to provision them with feedstock from 2009.

This comes after a recent story in Red Herring which raised questions about margins and silicon shortages for Chinese solar IPOs. So signing a long-term contract for silicon supply has to look good for them.