“Battery prices have fallen by 90% in the past five to eight years,” said Bowman. “As we transition to a cleaner network, solar generation combined with battery storage is the economical solution for California,” she added.
Hydrogen fuel cells, which produce electricity by combining hydrogen and oxygen, have emerged as a possible short-term solution for use in trucks and shipments, says Mr. Bloom. But such applications will require a costly expansion of the hydrogen gas service station network, said Steve Capanna, director of US climate policy and analysis for the Environmental Defense Fund. Now, he said, in addition to “a handful in California,” there aren’t many of those stations.
Buying renewable energy stocks now requires a degree of faith, because they are very expensive, in part because of the low interest rates engendered by the Federal Reserve, which helped boost the stock market in general. The Fed’s support may be the biggest reason the market has withstood all the bleak economic news from the coronavirus to continue its seemingly endless assessment advance.
Paul Coster, an analyst at JPMorgan, said that high prices in the renewable energy sector are based on solid achievements. “It’s not like the dot-com era,” he said. “These are real actors with real technology.” He added: “We are living in this wonderful time when virtue and personal interest coincide.”
Perhaps, pondered Coster, there are still good reasons to own some of these shares. He cited FuelCell Energy, which has negative cash flow and reports quarterly earnings losses consistently. Coster said that investors may want to project several years.
In 2025, he said, it is “feasible” for FuelCell Energy to have $ 60 million in profits before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, justifying a rich appreciation of growing stocks. Even so, the company’s shares more than doubled in the last month and, on January 14, Coster warned that, at current prices, the shares were already “richly valued”.