“Clean Energy Sector is Dead”

Nishant Gupta set up a green energy hedge fund last year managing about $100m in assets, but he probably wishes he hadn’t.

His words are about as blunt as any hedge fund owner could possibly get.

Hedge Fund Built on Energy Bets Says ‘Clean Is Dead for Now’

Bloomberg

“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.

Over the last year clean energy stocks have lost 20% of their value, whereas stocks in fossil fuels are up 13%.

So after the last year, skeptical investors are 30% richer than their believer friends. As it should be.

Gupta now says that ““The fundamentals are very poor”. Which is true if you were fundamentally betting on government handouts. The truth is the electrical fundamentals of Green investment were always awful, as were the “carbon” fundamentals. Investors should have got better advice from friends who were engineers who saw that unreliable renewables were an expensive fantasy that were doomed years ago.

He still claims there is some long term need for a clean energy transition, but his big plan is to find the “corners” of the market where he can identify “supply-chain bottlenecks as core investment opportunities”. Apparently that means he’s moved into companies that make compressors, vacuum systems and switches and fuses. Which sounds a lot like a man who’s stepped right out of the clean energy space.

The fall for clean energy shares started at the end of September last year, presumably as it dawned on green investors that Kamala was not going to win and keep the subsidies rolling.

The great unravelling of the Green delusion continues. Amazing that there is still 80% of the clean energy sector value left on the chopping block.

Image by Eynoxart from Pixabay