Some Thoughts on the Recent Discussion Here Solar and Wind
The price of solar energy has clearly gone down over the past few years due to technological improvements. Problems with solar are that they are intermittent sources and cannot be relied upon at least for base load. For now, storage costs remain high and so a complete system relying on solar and wind which includes storage is challenged from a cost point of view.
The other thing is that neither of these sources of energy production are not without adverse environmental consequences - eg bird deaths, noise from wind and wildlife damage from solar farms. We have already seen pushback about this.
From an investment point of view, none of this really matters to oil investors since at least in the developed world, oil use to produce electricity is very low.
Climate change (whether it is real or not - take your pick) is having an effect if we witness the increasing number of grid outages occurring. This fact is placing security of electricity supply more important especially for businesses that rely on a higher than average electricity consumption. A particular vulnerbility in this area are data server farms which are becoming more important as time goes on.
So from an investment perspective, finding companies with solutions to these business needs will yield higher than average investment returns. I have invested in a private company with such solutions which to date has a cap value of 6X my cost base. Recent discussion with the CFO suggests that in three years that number will skyrocket at the IPO stage. There are others out there if you spend the time to look.
In terms of companies in the renewable energy area, there was a mania about them up until about a year or two ago and they were overpriced. I sold my stakes in them back then. Since then, the price metrics for them are changing to highly favourable. In fact some have even lower metrics than SU... I have taken advantage of this over the past year through active trading. Within this sector are companies that I have talked about in past posts - companies like WM in the biogas area.