Is Alternative Energy a Good Investment Today?

By J.S. Kim

Although you hear a lot about alternative energy being a good investment today, I think that it’s still a lot more hype than reality. Yes I’ve heard the arguments for alternative energy investments such as high oil prices now make the development of alternative energy sources more appealing on a cost-benefit scale. And I know that major oil companies are pumping billions of dollars into developing alternative energy. Still, considering that Exxon declared over $9 billion in profits, not revenues, in just one quarter in 2006, several billion earmarked for alternative energy development is not a lot. And while I’m also aware that companies like Vesta Wind Systems has jumped by 40% in the last six to nine months, I still think that alternative energy investments are more of a trading strategy rather than investment strategy for the time being.

As you know we always discuss investing here, not trading, meaning that we wish to hold almost all of our investments for at least six months or longer, not just a couple of weeks or months. Although alternative energy is real, and it does work there are many reasons to be skeptical before jumping on board.

First of all, most crisis as presented by the media serve multiple interests, none of which includes the public at large. This is ironic because the major media all over the world seems to be deathly silent regarding real crises that do affect the public at large, such as one of the largest looming financial crises today. Anyone remember the travesty that was touted every single day in the media for at least a solid month leading up to New Year’s Eve 1999 that was called Y2K? And that whole “crisis” passed with not even a blip on anyone’s screen. But Y2K did serve many corporate interests. It served the media’s interest because by attracting scores of readers and viewers and higher advertising revenues, and it served the technology industry’s interests by resulting in millions, if not billions of increased sales of computers and software by fearful consumers.

I would not be one bit surprised years later to find out later that the public relations branches of technology companies were the ones that manufactured and released the lion’s share of Y2K stories to the media for public consumption. Likewise this is why I’m skeptical of the Peak Oil crisis. Personally I think Peak Oil has been manufactured by big oil to justify higher crude oil prices. The term Peak Oil conjures up images of scarcity, and we know that scarcity in the supply-demand yield curve leads to higher prices. Furthermore, the media is happy to disseminate the Peak Oil theory because any type of crisis generates more advertising revenue for them. Personally I think that most of the crises we hear about in the media are junk, cooked up in the back offices of public relations divisions of the very industries the well-publicized crises will benefit.

If anything, the threat of lost imports from Venezuela as Venezuela continues to strengthen trade relations with China poses more of a threat to the U.S. economy that the Peak Oil crisis. Over the next six years, China will invest over USD $5 billion in oil exploration and production in Venezuela and Venezuela will increasingly become less dependent upon the U.S. not only for its oil exports but also for oil infrastructure as China increasingly fills both of these needs.

With sophisticated 3-D and 4-D seismic imaging equipment today, we know that big oil has unearthed some huge reserves of oil in deep sea territories. In the past it was impossible to drill at the depths that oil and gas companies drill at today. But now, with the rapid development of deep-sea drilling technology, drilling at depths of 3,000 meters (over 10,000 feet) is not only becoming more common, but are leading to some significant oil and natural gas discoveries. In fact knowing that exploration is increasingly going deep sea, I bought a Norwegian company that specializes in building deep sea drilling infrastructure called Acergy and in a little over two months I’m sitting on nice fat 25% profits. At this point I’ll employ tight stop-losses on the stock but I still wouldn’t be surprised to see it go much higher in the next year. The point is, I don’t buy the Peak Oil crisis. And if the Peak Oil crisis isn’t real, and there is still a trillion more gallons of oil to be pumped out of the ground, big oil can and will kill any alternative energy sources from making it into the mainstream. There will be just too much profit at stake.

Case in point. Many people believe that some of the alternative energy sources being discussed today like fuel cells and so forth are new. In fact they aren’t new at all and have been around for decades. They just have never made it into the mainstream because big oil has always successfully killed their development. In 1834, Thomas Davenport invented the battery electric car. In 1889, Thomas Edison built an electric vehicle using nickel-alkaline batteries. Over a hundred years later, in 1996, U.S. auto giant General Motors manufactured electric cars that ran at speeds of up to 135 kilometers an hour, released zero emissions, and cost only USD $0.16 per litre to operate. What happened to a car that was much more friendly to both the consumer and the environment that the petrol powered car? Big oil killed it because it was big oil unfriendly.

So for this very reason, though I may be wrong, I think the future for alternative energy is just that – in the future.

This article may be freely reprinted on another website as long as it is not modified, changed, or altered in any way and as long as the below author byline is included along with the active hyperlink exactly as is.

J.S. Kim is the Managing Director of SmartKnowledgeU™. He has over thirteen years of experience in finance and financial services, and has earned a BA in Neurobiology from the University of Pennsylvania, a Master in Public Affairs from the University of Texas at Austin, and an MBA with a concentration in finance from the McCombs Business School, University of Texas at Austin. He is the inventor of the revolutionary MoneyPing™ investment strategies, a novel approach to learn how to build wealth, not just dreams.

To learn more at J.S. Kim's blog "The Zen of Investing", click the following link, Learn to Invest Money and Achieve Financial Freedom

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