FUELISH WISDOM

Sampling the delights of “The Motley Fool”:

A Bright Day for Solar?
Jack Uldrich, September 18, 2006 (The Motley Fool)
- Last week, fellow Fool Stephen Ellis wrote a persuasive article…investors might want to proceed with caution when considering an investment in Energy Conversion Devices…the company was trading at a value of eight times its sales…When I considered this news in conjunction with the fact that a number of other solar companies…are trading at high valuations…I concluded that solar might not be as "hot" of an investment as its proponents claim…An uncanny series of events, however, has caused me to reconsider…Let me explain.

- The first item that caught my attention was a little story about a new video making on the rounds on YouTube…"970 trillion kilowatt hours of energy fall from the skies every day" and it's unfortunate that, as a planet, we haven't figured out how to make better use of this clean, cheap, and sustainable energy source…
- [A]nother story from earlier in the week about how Energy Photovoltaics was installing a series of photovoltaic windows in Microsoft's new "School of the Future" in Philadelphia…
- [A] big picture of astronauts from the Space Shuttle Atlantis unfurling a massive 240-foot solar array manufactured by Lockheed Martin…when it's fully operational in 2010, it will provide the International Space Station with one-quarter of its power -- 110 kilowatts of electricity, or enough to power 55 regular households…
- I squeezed into my seat for the first leg of the international flight, I was startled to see the gentleman across the aisle from me reading a book titled Got Sun? Go Solar! It was a primer on the benefits of installing solar power…because he was seriously thinking about installing solar cells on his house…"green" tendencies but was still more concerned with that other type of green -- the almighty dollar…

- The Financial Times…an article titled "Building a Greener House," which prominently featured solar power…
- [T]he passenger next to me…had just left his job at Siemens and was now working for a private U.S.-based company that was developing solar fabrics…
- I'm going to get serious about doing my due diligence on companies such as Suntech Power Holdings -- which appears to be trading at a much more reasonable valuation -- because something tells me brighter days are ahead for the burgeoning solar industry…