Redwood Materials, Oklo, and Other Unicorns of Clean Energy - Barron's
Redwood Materials, Oklo, and Other Unicorns of Clean Energy - Barron's
It has been a disastrous year for clean-energy stocks, with higher interest rates battering profits. Share prices for almost every solar, wind, and hydrogen company—and several electric-vehicle makers—have fallen by double-digits.
But clean energy’s long-term trajectory is still angled sharply upward. A new generation of companies, undaunted by the current challenges, is moving toward the public markets just as the world begins pouring real money into the energy transition—more than $1.7 trillion this year alone.
Because the transition represents a stark change with plenty of unproven technologies, these companies all come with high risks—but also potentially high returns. It isn’t often that investors can place bets on a sea change in the gargantuan world of energy. There are dozens of promising clean-energy companies, but only a handful with the necessary size for public markets.
“Just because your technology works, it’s meaningless in the energy industry,” says Gene Berdichevsky, CEO of Sila Nanotechnologies, an electric-vehicle battery company. “It’s amazing the scale that it takes just to get in the game.”
Related Knowledge Center: ENERGY BASICS: renewables
Renewable energy sources — once the fuel of the future, then practical in specific, narrow applications — are increasingly economic mainstream sources of power generation. Hydropower was long the mainstay of U.S. renewable electricity generation, although wind power surpassed hydro for the first time in 2019, and solar continues its rapid growth. The continued growth of wind and solar, with their fluctuations, is tied in part to improvements in storage technology: batteries.