When the Governors' Wind & Solar Energy Coalition Posts That There's A Problem, You Know It's Even Worse

The Governors' Wind & Solar Energy Coalition includes several states interested in promoting wind and solar energy.

Both blue and red states have been involved, and the following is how they describe themselves:

The Governors’ Wind & Solar Energy Coalition is a bipartisan group of the nation’s governors who are dedicated to the development of the nation’s wind and solar energy resources to meet America’s domestic energy demands in an environmentally responsible manner—while reducing the nation’s dependence on imported energy sources and stimulating state and national economic development.

Through its multi-state coordinated efforts, the Coalition undertakes initiatives designed to encourage sound policy and legislation for the development and distribution of wind and solar energy; to communicate and demonstrate the value and benefits of wind and solar energy to consumers, energy companies and policy makers; to create an environment of support for those who wish to develop responsible wind and solar energy resources; and to make investments in infrastructure to support expansion of wind and solar energy across the United States.

That’s a strange agenda for a group including Arkansas, Kansas, Montana and South Dakota.

But, then, the organization was formed in 2013 or so and a lot has changed over the last dozen years. The website, though, has obviously not been seriously updated since 2017, which tells a great deal right off the bat. And, the news items on the site apppear to be on auto-pilot. Otherwise, this article from Bloomberg, would never have appeared:

Less than a year after launching a hedge fund dedicated to the green energy transition, its founder says there’s currently no financial gain to be had from investing in renewable power.

“The whole sector — solar, wind, hydrogen, fuel cells — anything clean is dead for now,” said Nishant Gupta, founder and chief investment officer at London-based Kanou Capital LLP.

Against a barrage of political headwinds in the US, a war-fueled energy crisis and stubbornly high interest rates, large parts of the clean-energy industry are stalling. In the past year, the S&P Global Clean Energy Index has lost 20%, a period during which the S&P 500 Index gained 16%. And with the Trump administration shredding climate policies in the world’s largest economy, many green investors are taking a timeout.

“The fundamentals are very poor,” said Gupta, who worked at Clean Energy Transition LLP, a hedge fund with about $2.7 billion under management, before branching out on his own last year. “I’m not talking about long term. I’m talking about where I see weakness right now.”

That weakness has been several years in the making. The post-pandemic era brought with it the first major blow to green asset values, making the strategy harder to sell. Republicans then seized on the moment, introducing bans and litigation threats against environmental and social-investing strategies.

Despite such headwinds, Gupta says the long-term need for a clean-energy transition remains. So his hedge fund, which manages about $100 million of assets, is focused on finding corners of the market where supply-demand dynamics will inevitably drive up prices…

Shares of the company, whose biggest investors include Capital Group, Vanguard Group Inc. and BlackRock Inc., gained about 80% over the past three years. The stock is down 7% this year…

[A] company that the hedge fund manager likes is Legrand SA, a French maker of everything from switches to fuses and circuit breakers. Its shares are up about 12% this year.

“When a heat pump and an EV charger are both added to a home, electricity usage can nearly triple” and “this surge in demand significantly benefits Legrand,” Gupta said. The company’s biggest investors are Sun Life Financial Inc., Massachusetts Financial Services Co. and BlackRock, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

While Kanou has made the energy transition its overarching strategy, Gupta says he’ll only pick companies with widening margins and strong growth. In recent years, however, such performance metrics have eluded key corners of the transition economy, with traditional green stocks like Orsted A/S suffering huge setbacks.

And businesses pegging their hopes to clean-burning hydrogen have seen growth prospects disappear amid persistently high costs.

As any reader can discern, all the current facts in this article are downers, and the only good news is purely speculative. The big grifters at BlackRock and Vanguard have largely already made their money based on earlier speculation and are now mostly running away, although BlackRock still sees corporatist opportunities in heat pumps to which Kathy Hochul and others will undoubtedly throw a combination of ratepayer and taxpayer money. It’s over except for half measures, and the surest evidence it's been that way for some time is the way out-of-date website of the Governors' Wind & Solar Energy Coalition.

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