Money, money, money says Morgan. Learn to spell trillion.
Reminds me of an ancient folk song that went, "green, green, it's green they say, on the far side of the hill." Now Morgan Stanley puts the top of the hill about 22 years away, but they also predict a lot of green along the way. S'pose MS read our blog yesterday on how high oil prices are driving solar stocks?
Morgan Stanley sees green tech sales totaling as much as $1 trillion per year by 2030. Reuters summarized a Morgan Stanley research note, not available to the public, "On the market's upside, revenues could reach $505 billion in 2020, or nearly nine times the level in 2005, and hit $1.02 trillion 10 years later, the bank said." Sounds like a helluva lot more than my weekly beer allowance.
Reuters cites four companies in greentech that MS will now cover with analysis: "The bank also initiated coverage of the clean energy industry. It rated the following companies as overweight-volatile: thin film solar company First Solar Inc, solar company SunPower Corp, biofuel company VeraSun Energy Corp., and emissions reducers Fuel Tech Inc."
First Solar's website. They are based in Phoenix with two manufacturing plants already, one in US and one in Germany. Three more are slated for Malaysia.
Sunpower Corp. is based in San Jose. They just happened to be reporting their quarterly earnings today. Here are their highlights: "Q3 2007 revenue of $234.3 million, up 258.6 percent year on year "466-megawatt solar cell Fab 2 dedicated and production ramping on first two lines "Achieved 20.1 percent efficiency world record for mass produced solar panel "$24.7 million, three-year Solar American Initiative agreement signed with U.S. Department of Energy "Dedication of first of 28 Macy's solar electric systems in California "18-megawatt Olivenza Spanish solar power plant order booked in October." 258%, they trying to steal the sunlight from Google?
VeraSun Energy. Thery operate ethanol plants in the Midwest. Their website map shows nine, placed from Ohio west to Nebraska.
FuelTech is based in Illinois. Their gig is making systems to remove pollution from the fossil fuel burning plants of the world. Talk about a growth industry. Wait'll China tries to curtail pollution from their gazillion coal-burning plants...and let's hope it's soon. Don't care how rich those guys at FuelTech get.
Meanwhile, a couple quick notes on Morgan Stanley, where this all started. They laid off some folks today as well. One was their newspaper analyst. Not covering that any more. Perhaps that analyst could get into buggy whips and horseshoes. As gasoline prices continue to rise there's a chance horse buggies will spread beyond Central Park once again. Newspapers, however, are a lesson in changing technologies.
And it may interest those outside New Yawk to know that Morgan Stanley may build a new headquarters in Manhattan in a project that has a little of the green about it. It would involve reclaiming abandoned railway yards. Another object lesson in the evolution of technologies.