In our special focus on Alternative Energy, we spoke with analyst Theodore O’Neill of Kaufman Bros., who talked to us a little bit about Investing in Green Technology. O’Neill felt that Solar Technology isn’t in a position to be economically feasible without subsidies any time soon. Here’s what he feels the industry would need to reach that:

Mr. O’Neill: If the solar industry is really going to get to parity, the production facilities that we have are going to have to improve pretty dramatically. Solar cells are semiconductors. If you look into a modern semiconductor factory, you see a process that is highly tuned to produce a particular yield in a particular product and the equipment used to tune the process is not in place at any of the solar manufacturers. So the solar industry is going to have to embrace bringing in a lot of the methodology and inspection equipment that you would find in a traditional semiconductor fab. Management will have to bring that into the solar business to really get to the professional level in order for this to become a real business.

For the complete Alternative Energy issue, including a full interview with Mr. O’Neill, other analysts in this space, and a wide variety of CEOS, click here.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 5:39 pm and is filed under Natural Resources Stocks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.