Finance


Large corporations are steadily replacing governments and banks in financing renewable energy transport fuels and technologies, helping a popular sector for venture capital and private equity early stage funding cross the infamous development “valley of death” in search of scale.

The renewable energy transportation sector has reached a pivot point in which the needs and criteria of investors is changing ahead of a new race to scale up transformational technologies, a panel of bankers, lawyers and project developers said at the Renewable Energy Transport Forum in Washington, DC this week. The event was hosted by the American Council on Renewable Energy (and this author spoke on one of the conference panels). Keep reading →


How do you get a weak signal from noisy data? That’s the question Blu Putnam, Managing Director and Chief Economist at exchange operator CME Group says will dominate the future of data analysis.

At a time when everyone is suffering from information overload, everyone also has a choice to make about how they handle and analyze the data they work with and often live by. While Putnam takes a ‘Bayesian’ approach (learn more about that here), others are trusting in everything from aggressive data mining to narrowing down data needs to suit desired outcomes (learn more about a wind energy startup based on that premise here). Keep reading →


The floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange in lower Manhattan is one of the rare places the complex interplay between the ‘real’ economy of infrastructure and goods and the financial economy of data sets and dizzying amounts of money can be seen in action.

In an increasingly computerized trading world, floor traders at Nymex, since 2008 part of the globe-spanning exchange powerhouse CME Group, are an increasingly rare breed involved in an increasingly unusual occupation. But for pure dramatic representation of the financial economy at work, nothing conveys the reach and reality of the trading universe like a busy pit moving contracts in real commodities. Keep reading →


Independent retail electricity providers have sprung up in various states across the US where deregulation has occurred and policies have been put in place to spur competition.

Approximately 20 states have enacted such policies, but the trend toward choosing electricity suppliers appears to be growing. Keep reading →


‘What gets measured, gets managed,’ is an long-standing cliché of business, but its truth is often self-evident when it comes to governance. In planning energy policies, regulators and businesses and even voters must have access to the right kind of data before they can even see which problems are most pressing and which solutions most viable.

The International Energy Agency’s new five-year forecast for the renewable energy sector joins the fuel-specific reports covered by its widely read oil, natural gas and coal mid-term reports. Those fossil fuels need little introduction, and in the developed countries covered by IEA and its parent organization – the OECD – production, processing, use and reserves of the traditional energy complex is very advanced and taken as fact. Keep reading →


With natural gas competing more strongly than ever with coal for power generation due to near commodity price parity, the mergers and acquisitions market for utilities has entered rarely charted territory.

Of the coal or natural gas utility merger and acquisition deals done in the last 18 months, there were probably 10 times that amount worked on but not closed, John Dingle, Partner at management consulting firm Thorndike Landing told the Platts Utility M&A Conference held June 25th – 26th in New York. Keep reading →


Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, will leverage its scale to bring affordable renewable power to consumers using its experience from the retail industry.

Rahul Raj, director of sustainability and merchandising innovation at Walmart.com, said that the retail giant aspires to 100% renewable power. Keep reading →

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