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Comment by grunder_advice | Hacker News Reader

I've held green tech stocks in the past but never made a dime out of them. There was a pattern to them. First there'd be demand, then the factories in China will turn on and suddenly there's a glut so the price goes back down. Then the factories would shut off again and the cycle repeats. I wonder if that's still happening.

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Interestingly, oil investors experience this boom-and-bust cycle too: every time oil prices spike, a bunch of extra companies flood into the market to drill some wells or weld pipelines or build tankers or whatever. All the extra supply crashes the price and most of the new companies go bankrupt or get consolidated into the big energy firms. This slowly brings spare capacity back down, so the next time there's a disruption the cycle kicks off for its next round.

That used to be true, but things have really settled down. Notice the lack of rushing to start more fracking or refining projects during this crisis.

I don't know that I would hear about it. How would I know?

This is probably the most relevant metric:

https://rigcount.bakerhughes.com/

Not seeing a bunch more rigs operating means there new drilling isn’t ramping up.

Typical commodity cycle...most commodities work like this

Green stocks in the west will not be successful because of green politics in the West.

Green tech is a fledgling industry trying to challenge a dominant, well established one.

Any such industry needs basic government support, but at the very least, predictable government regulation.

Unfortunately not only have we not seen support, we’ve seen opposition from the government, and the stability has been laughable.

Meanwhile that’s exactly what the Chinese government is providing which means the entire industry (outside of a now small section of wind power in Europe, which preceded green tech becoming political football) is Chinese, so you and I and pretty much everyone outside China has been cut off from benefitting from it as an investment and can only benefit from it as consumers.

There is hope that the Europeans might finally get their act together here, but hoping the Europeans may get their act together in investment, industrial and financial policy has so far been a fool’s game. There’s little to no hope for America getting its act together for at least a few years in the green tech supply chain, although the actual green tech consumption seems to be growing even with the political headwinds.

AI is getting a multitrillion valuation business, and depends on energy in US a lot, so I can imagine that all kind of energy lobby will get very strong.

Of course I believe oil lobby doesn't want competition, so it will be a rich guys' fight.

in the end green power will win because energy efficiency means greater profits and that’s what capitalism demand. the question of how long it will take though is anyone’s guess

You are projecting a lot. Europe is obsessed with green energy. As soon as we in the UK start seeing any tangible benefits of green energy i.e, lower prices which is the main thing anyone who isn't an upper middle class liberal cares about then i'll be on here singing it's praises.

Green energy is challenging because it has many times less density then every other form out there, among other reasons.

I'm not confident that any of us will ever see lower prices due to green energy. Why would the power company who currently makes $XX billions of dollars per year ever provide that same service for $(XX-YY) billions of dollars per year when they could pocket the cost savings themselves and pump up their stock value?

Aside from privately owned solar/wind/battery on your own home, there's no evidence that I've seen anyway that indicates when utilities move to more green energy generation that those savings get passed on to customers. Perhaps, there are examples out there somewhere.

> Europe is obsessed with green energy

I wish that was true…

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