Originally posted by Upthefog
No malice intended but what convinced you to purchase in the first place? What has changed since then apart from the SP decline? Did you appropriately research? This is not a dig but a genuine query please.
Not a problem, happy to answer this.
Look, we purchased the shares after reading as much as we could and acknowledging that solar is going to be more and more relevant going forward.
It was after conversations with various colleagues and friends (commercial building industry) that the small doubts settled in and we realised that perhaps we hadn't done our due diligence in relation to the rather large issue of power storage.
As everyone knows power generated solar, not used or stored at the time of generation is lost and the penny dropped that we hadn't read a word from CPV in relation to power storage. This got us asking specific questions from an engineer friend of ours and an electrician as to the complexities of using this power in a curtain wall high rise situation. Basically, the answer we kept getting 'anything's possible if you're prepared to pay enough'.
Not what we wanted to hear, so we started to research further eg. voltage drop over distance, battery life, etc.
Further to this, I've commented previously that I feel the company needs to build a presence, or gain some traction within the Australian market. They're basically travelling the world on our dime, with very little to show at these Expo's. Onyx maybe an inferior product but they have built a base in the United States and can go to the Expos with a proven working product and sales to boot.
I will also bring up again a company called Ubiquitous Energy in the U.S, which sell a solar generating glass called 'Clearview Power'. Haven't looked into this too thoroughly but it is at least on par with Clearvue's product. Trump is promoting USA all the way and doing a good job of it, whether you like him or not.
Yeah the payback figures have been spruiked by Clearvue but they're yet to be verified. On a whole, the technologies great but you have to look at the bigger picture. Foreign investment in Australian real estate is starting to recede, the banking sector will be tightening up on home/apartment lending and from what I'm reading larger deposits will be required to get into the housing market. Salaries are stagnant and the cost of living just keeps rising, the majority of people aren't going to be able to spend the additional amount required for a product such as this. They won't be looking at 'savings' down the road, they just want to purchase a home.
Developers who install the Clearvue glass plus the associated energy storage technology will automatically pass that on to the buyer, you don't get it for nothing.
We do a lot of work in the retail construction sector in Victoria and I can assure you these centres do not spend one more cent than they have to. You can offer them a solution which will give a better result for the long term but if it costs more they're not interested. That is the current climate we live in.
All in all, we really do like this technology but without a storage solution it's simply a window with a couple of wires hanging out. As for the team running Clearvue, I'm not too sure.
As I said before I wish all the holders the best and I'm more than happy to be proved wrong but we'll be bailing out as soon as we can. We own quite a few other small cap's. None of them have taken the battering, even with the events of late last week, that CPV has.
Good luck with it.
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