This poll opened on January 31st, 2007 and closed on February 1st, 2007. Total voters for this poll: 158 Solar 27% (43 votes) Ethanol 21% (33 votes) Fuel Cells/Hydrogen 17% (27 votes) Wind 11% (18 votes) Coal-to-Liquids 8% (13 votes) Geothermal 4% (6 votes) Other 11% (17 votes)
Whenever I see a poll like this, I’m tempted to use it as a contrarian indicator… Time to buy wind and geothermal (and one of those geothermal votes was mine)… but I’m already overweight in wind and geothermal: go figure.
Why is is that people get excited by solar at 10-25 cents per kWh, while wind and geothermal, at 3-8 cents per kWh are a big yawn?
Good point, Tom.
I think this probably harks back to the fact that, comparatively speaking, there have been few “exciting” wind and geothermal investment stories in the past while.
Most of the attention has been on solar and ethanol, and now it looks like lithium-ion batteries are getting a fair dose of it.
The point you make is a good one, and I guess the lesson to take out of this lack of interest in both technologies (i.e. wind and geothermal), which hold very real potential, is that this market is currently not efficient, and that there could be room to exploit those inefficiencies.
It amazes me that solar does so well even though it is still nowhere near cost competitive yet Geothermal, which is already very competitive comes in last. Check out ORA which has over 900 MW of geothermal generating capacity installed and working with excellent profits and amazing reliability. They are now building a 200 MW plant in New Zealand and a 380 MW plant in Indonesia.
An interesting report about geothermal came out not too long ago. I assume many of you have heard about/read it by now, but, if not, you can find info about it here
All of the attention has been on ethanol and solar as far as I can tell, and now it looks like lithium-ion batteries are getting some shine also.