Solar Deals

These aren’t heavyweight deals but with all the fuss about Spain (and if its not Spain, its Germany, and if its not Germany its the US, and if its not US, they will find something), it’s nice to see some deals with a brand name in Italy for both Suntech Power (STP) and Trina Solar (TSL). I had to hit refresh on my screen about 8x to make sure the quote was correct on the latter – I believe the last time it was up 5%+ might of been the Carter administration. Ok, I exaggerate.

• Chinese solar companies Trina Solar Ltd (TSL) and Suntech Power Holdings Co Ltd (STP) have signed separate supply agreements with a unit of Italy’s biggest power company, Enel SpA , the companies said on Tuesday.
• Suntech said it would supply Enel.si with 30 megawatts of photovoltaic solar modules later this year and in 2009.
• Trina said it would supply the company with 17 MW of modules starting this year.
• Enel is a world leader in generating electricity from renewable sources. It plans to spend 7.4 billion euros on such investments by the end of 2012.

I continue to be flummoxed by the action in this sector – it simply seems like a group that requires the retail trader confidence to be high for the names to move; maybe institutions still do not believe in the story. It’s coming; investors seeded $148 BILLION into solar, wind, and other renewables in 2007. In fact as I think about what the next bubble, pumped up with Uncle Ben’s easy money policies, would be (we need one every 3-4 years to keep the mirage that is "economic health" in the US going), this looks like the perfect future target.

As for the U.S. – we are always reactive, not proactive but once an emergency slaps us across the face and you get us riled up, we really do things right – U.S. Solar Market could Surpass Germany by 2011. Frankly we don’t even need "America" – we just need California.

• “It’s got roughly half the population of Germany, twice the incident sunlight and about one-tenth the market of Germany [today],” Johnson said of California.

And probably most important, the smartest kids in the room are snapping up land quietly throughout the U.S. Southwest.

• Solar prospectors tend to be as secretive about their land as forty-niners were about the veins of gold they discovered. Most bids are placed by limited-liability corporations with opaque names that conceal their ownership. And no one has been as quick to move into the Mojave – or as tightlipped about it – as Solar Investments.
• That entity, it turns out, is Goldman Sachs’s solar subsidiary. The investment bank’s designs on the desert are a topic of intense interest and speculation. Goldman declined to comment.

Long Trina Solar, Smartest Kids in the Room in fund; long Trina Solar in personal account