It’s not an overstatement to say that electric energy is the foundation on which modern society is built.
Without it, your internet doesn’t work, your iPhone doesn’t charge, your lights don’t turn on, your air conditioner doesn’t run, and you can’t watch television. If you’ve had your power knocked out for an extended period, you know how anxious we get without those conveniences.
But it’s more than just a convenience. Just ask the people in Texas and much of the South.
Furnaces don’t run in dangerous cold. Those in need of medical devices to survive must find a power source (like sitting in their running car and tapping into the battery). Even running water is unavailable or unsafe.
It becomes a matter of life and death.
Texas may have its own power grid, but the nation’s grid is a patchwork of multiple grids developed through the years. Some improvements have been made in the last 50 years, including smart meters, but more is needed. We may get that if Congress passives a massive infrastructure bill as expected.
In addition, the very source of electrical power is changing. And with that comes a massive transformation with equally massive investment potential …
On September 2, 1882, Thomas Edison stood in the office of the legendary banker J. Pierpont Morgan, hoping to impress.
At the time, inventors around the world were in a mad rush to create commercially viable electric power. The competitive and brilliant Edison worked on the concept for years … aiming to be the one who made it happen.
Hoping to impress Morgan — one of his most important investors — Edison stood in the man’s New York office and gave his chief electrician the signal to start delivering power from the now-famous Pearl Street Generating Station.
Hundreds of electric lamps in downtown Manhattan came to life … the Pearl Street Station became the world’s first commercial power plant … and the world entered the electric age.
The innovations created by Edison and other geniuses of the age totally changed the world. To harness the new form of power and illumination, we built power lines across the entire nation. We built hundreds of power plants and burned vast amounts of coal to keep them running. We dug up billions of pounds of copper and fashioned it into wires. We created tens of thousands of time-saving inventions powered by electricity.
There was the world before electricity … and the world after electricity.
For more than a hundred years, producing “utility scale” amounts of power hasn’t changed much. Fossil fuels like coal and natural gas started out as the primary power generation fuels … and they still are.
That’s why a major change to the way we produce electric power doesn’t involve tens of billions of dollars … or even hundreds of billions of dollars. It involves trillions of dollars.
This giant business is about to change in a very big way.
Those who know about this change and its trillion-dollar implications stand to make enormous amounts of money.
The mainstream media isn’t talking about it yet, but we are on verge of a power revolution.
During the 1900s, the world relied almost exclusively on “dirty” fuel to produce electricity. Coal was responsible for more than 50% of U.S. power generation. It was also responsible for most of the electric power in big countries like China and India.
“Dirty” fuel was so popular because it was so cheap. But the growth it enabled came at a price.
Burning all that fossil fuel produced a lot of pollution. Many of the world’s top scientists believe man-made climate change is causing temperatures to climb, sea levels to rise, and ice caps to melt.
This is why “climate change” is often cited as the number one worry for people around the world.
And many people see renewable energy from sources like the sun and wind energy as the solution.
You can’t blame people for thinking solar and wind power are legitimate answers. You can feel them on your skin. They are all around us … and their power is awesome. In 2007, an article in Scientific American estimated that the energy in sunlight that hits Earth in just over 40 minutes is equivalent to mankind’s total annual energy consumption.
In other words, enough power to run the world for a year … arriving in less than an hour.
Collecting, storing, and harnessing the sun’s output has been a technological challenge for decades. Solar technology wasn’t advanced enough to produce energy cheaply on a giant scale — the scale big enough to power factories and cities.
But in just the past decade, a solar revolution has begun that will lead to the biggest change to the energy market in a century.
Bloomberg NEF predicts that by 2025, the cost to generate power from solar will be cheaper than oil for the first time ever. Money talks, and this would open the door to mass adoption of solar.
Governments around the world want to lower carbon emissions and are turning to solar to do it. Here in the U.S., President Biden has proposed a mammoth clean energy plan that is worth over $2 trillion.
This massive change is already underway. In 2020, only about 2% of electricity in the U.S. came from solar power … but solar accounted for 18% of all new energy capacity. You can see where this is going.
Solar power is at an inflection point. As the technology improves and costs come down, the path forward is clear. The upside potential in solar is one of the best opportunities in the investment world.
The more a technology changes the world, the more revenue it will generate and the more gains it can produce for investors.
It doesn’t get much bigger than what’s coming with solar power. And now is the time to get in for the biggest profits.
The post Solar Stocks: It’s Time to Invest in One of the Most Valuable Technologies Ever appeared first on Investor Place and is written by Matt McCall
Original source: Investor Place
