Member Info for Alfacomp

only about 160K shares traded so far today. The MMs are getting nowhere by dropping the price like this - nobody is selling them the shares they evidently need. When they have run out of road like this then the only thing they can do is

1) try an even more aggressive price drop to try and trigger some stop losses
2) talk to their shorting friends to try and encourage them to present their necks to the block
3) try and generate some buying interest by moving the price up quickly - this obvious increases the size of the short position that they have but at a higher average price, which they may be able to get on the post spike walk down. If they are going to take this option then walking the price down 3% in the morning is perhaps not the best way to proceed.

Holders need to be fully aware of the games that might be contemplated.

MadasaHat - great question - the experience rates analysis that I was covering uses what is called the 'Levelised Cost of Storage' (LCOS) which is the upfront cost and the maintenance costs spread across the life of the battery asset, all divided by the amount of energy stored over that time.

However, there is no standard definition of LCOS - and so one needs to be careful about who's 'LCOS' one is referring to and what assumptions they make. For example, Lazard's LCOS makes the assumption that the battery is charged and discharged only once a day - this might be appropriate for a home battery system backed by a PV panel, but is most definitely not appropriate for primary and secondary grid regulation which will be called upon much more often.

No questions ? 389 views and everyone entirely straight on all points I assume.

apologies - the 'publish' button seemed to switch back off - it should work now

as requested:-

https://www.thebushveldperspective.com/energy-storage-europe-2019-part1

enjoy. I'm going to have my dinner now so you have 1 hour to think up some good questions.

Still working on it, so we may reach the 100 before I publish !

I am surprised by the relative lack of interest in the possibility of this write-up, today of all days.

I am travelling for much of the day but will hopefully have the time to produce something later, assuming those here are really keen to find out a little more about the future of energy storage.

Tyfoon,

an interesting idea but the only problem with that theory is that it costs a lot of money to build a smelter and they have none, and have had very minimal success in attracting any over the last 5 years. When people see their website they may get an inkling why - inspiring it is not.

Given BMN's very healthy cashflows there is more chance that BMN would build a smelter and then use it purely for themselves - however that would not really fit with our vertically integrated mine-to-batteries model and would also not fit with Fortune's general approach to cost minimisation and asset maximisation.

Ironveld is currently keeping it's investors happy with talk of digging up the ore and shipping it to a 'major potential iron and steel mfr. offtake partner' for long term testing - so they actually appear to have backed away from the smelter plan as well. Of course Highveld lies idle should anyone really want to do anything really significant.

a report on the Energy Storage Europe conference held this week in Dusseldorf ?

Given that this is of more fundamental importance than the ebbs and flow of weekly speculative trading I feel that it is not unreasonable to assume three figures for requests for this.

The suggestion that carbon particles do us a valuable service in creating clouds is just another of the various distracting 'whatabout' arguments that is put up when climate contrarians try to undermine the arguments for dealing with greenhouse gas emissions - the suggestion is put there to make people think "well why don't we just make more pollution then ?"

From that first quoted article:-

Whereas reflective aerosols tend to brighten clouds and make them last longer, the black carbon from soot can have the opposite effect. Studies of pollution over the Indian Ocean and biomass burning smoke in the Amazon have shown that the black carbon warms the surrounding atmosphere and can cause cloud droplets to evaporate.

I know a little about this as I have a close relation whose PhD relates to the study of the albedo (the reflectiveness of a surface) of the antarctic.

Richken - yes as refrigeration is something I am otherwise interested in I thought I would probe them about their system. A central chiller might make more sense from an efficiency point of view but I suspect that they make each container self contained so that they can test and sign off each one individually, as opposed to having to ship a bunch of separate Battery containers and Refrigeration containers to site, connecting them all up, and then discovering that there is something wrong at the system level.

This obviously results in a degree of overspecification and a rather large spend on rackmount and electrical cupboard steelwork - all good for Rittal but not for keeping the price down. The laser cut front ventilated doors of all these cabinets also probably cost a fair few euros each. Very pretty if you want to make it look like you have walked into a datacentre, a waste of effort otherwise.

Someone really seems to like the number 119

Plus about 25% of the size of the container is taken up with airconditioning equipment - I bet they don’t mention that when they talk about the ‘electrical efficiency’ of their systems. VRFBs naturally use the flowing liquid electrolyte to remove any heat from the power stacks so don’t need to try blowing hundreds of cubic metres of air around - a very bad thermal transport medium

Kev - indeed only yesterday I was chatting with one of the integrators of large lithium ion batteries (shipping container sized) who confessed that once a fire has started you can’t stop it with anything. His precise words were “you can put the battery underwater and it won’t stop burning” and “all you can do is shut the door and run away” - not entirely the response that you get when you ask the salesmen about safety issues.

Numpty - I did about 5 months ago and was told it was to do with their data supplier and they cannot possibly change the data themselves presumably as that would be a crime akin to repainting the Turin shroud

Huzzy - the information I have is that climate change is not going away anytime in the next 50 years so if you want to invest in a company that is going to be making a major contribution to addressing that problem you could not find a better one than this.

I cannot respond more fully as I am attending an energy storage conference right now but in short before Xmas there was about 15m deficit in the mms pocket and then in January there was approx 400k more buys than sells each day. Consult the last graph in my last trade analysis and then integrate

Well the Market Makers are clearly playing a perfectly neutral book at the moment so if it does start appreciating quickly you can expect the brakes to be removed rather quickly. Put simply the MM's dare not risk taking out or increasing any short positions by selling shares that they do not have at these prices because they risk not being able to procure those shares until much higher prices are reached.

Dagnamit et al - would anyone be interested in a follow up article on this conference ?