Highest Rated Comments


pperca621 karma

Let me see if I got this right.

1) You are tech developers who do not really have financial investment background or deep knowledge of the solar energy space.

2) The people you expect to crown fund these farms likely do not have that knowledge either and I don't see anything in your proposal that will help a regular investor decide which projects to fund (that's why ETFs have professionals with decades in the industry to "handpick which solar projects" to invest). Solar investments are not Instagram posts for you to "like". It requires a minimum of understanding of the energy market, solar technology and investigation on the background of the company running the farm to be a realistic proposal. I don't see your proposal of "letting a layman pick a solar project to invest" as a benefit at all.

3) All you seem to offer is a vague promise of "my future emissions will be tracked by an app on my phone". I'm not really quite sure what you are planning to track here, how relevant it is or what that has to do with efficiency and financial health of the farm you intend to fund.

So, instead of investing in SEC regulated solar ETFs (some that have been producing some very healthy returns of 50+% YTY which are driving more investments and new projects), do you expect people to send investment money to your GoFund style platform with no return guarantees and some questionable tech features like a fuzzy carbon metric?

I sincerely hope that's not all you are proposing and that the friends and family members that provided with you with the angel funding do not need that money.

A real solar investment offering will require a lot more sophisticated energy planning tooling to assess investment and viability of those farms (location, sun coverage, local demand, local supply, grid capabilities, energy trading figures, historic energy bid analysis with predictions and trends). You don't seem to be even in the ballpark of that kind of plan.

I'd pass, sorry.

pperca222 karma

So our CEO actually has worked on financial modeling for both gas pipelines and large solar projects so we do have some industry expertise on our team!

I can see in your website he was an intern and then an analyst in the trading desk for Vega Energy for about a year. I'm afraid that's not a whole lot of experience with energy trading and solar production.

We also totally agree that the diversification offered by ETFs is very beneficial.

It's not just diversification but fund managers they have experience with the markets and a fiduciary responsibility with the investor's money. In your model both are missing.

ETFs I've seen are mostly comprised of companies that are related to the solar space but aren't primarily involved in the business of financing solar farms

Like I said in another reply, I don't think lack of capital is what's holding back solar farms. The real issues are related to the grid and energy storage, not production.

One of our goals is to make it extremely easy to invest in these types of products while also surfacing important details about the underlying assets in a clean and transparent way.

During the tech bubble of the 2000's, it was extremely easy to invest in tech companies that inflated their revenue numbers by making out deals with other tech startups. No real money existed, just paper.

Ease of investment is not the issue here. Let's assume you are widely successful, make tons of money in fees, a huge number of non viable farms are funded and the whole thing crashes. The fossil fuel companies would have a field day with that financial disaster, solar will have a huge set back, investors will be out of their money but you guys will keep the fees. Sounds like the risk is all with other people.

If the average investor of a solar ETF like Invesco wanted more information on what they were invested in they would have to dig through the SEC filings of the individual companies comprising the ETF. One of our goals is to make understanding what your invested in as easy and transparent as possible.

The reason why the SEC is involved in securities and investments is to prevent scams. If the average investors can't read an SEC filing, that person has no business investing in a model like yours.

Unless you intent to file the same disclosures as an ETF and be regulated the same, I believe transparency won't mean much since there's no actual oversight.

Rather, we think that as a private market investment with an underlying revenue generating asset (where the revenue may be contracted or uncontracted depending on the investor's risk profile), users can diversify their portfolio by investing a small percentage with us.

If you don't plan to run this as a regular ETF, I would not recommend anybody to invest any amount in this model. Even kickstarters have rules related to investments that don't pay up.

Are you guys going to monitor how the money is invested by those farms, will those farms have to file financial disclosures to get the money, will any of this be regulated?

Finally, our offerings will be registered with the SEC

As what? What kind of classification will be used for your investment instrument?

realtime tracking of carbon emissions reduction

What exactly are you planning to track? Just because there's a farm producing energy with a person's money, that doesn't translate in emission cuts by said individual.

It will require realtime tracking of the productivity of the underlying asset

Again, solar production and reduction in carbon emissions are not the same thing. The grid usually can't handle the extra energy at peak hours from solar and wind. Most of that energy is wasted, especially if not forecasted correctly. The bidding in the morning is what defines what goes in the grid, so monitoring production does nothing more than understand production availability.

this is a cool new feature we can offer that provides a transparency from a climate change impact perspective that people haven't seen before!

With all due respect, it's a gimmick designed to attack uneducated investors that will be fooled into believing that's a real metric.

Again, you guys seem to be trying to oversimplify a very complex and intricate market just to become a trade desk for a niche targeting non sophisticated investors.

pperca161 karma

What do you offer that a regular solar ETF wouldn't?

pperca69 karma

What kind of protections a site like that would have against bias?

Uninformed people rating articles based on their ideology do not make your site any less biased than the original sources.

What kind of safeguards do you have to eliminate that? As we have seen in Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, popularity does not equate to truth.

pperca63 karma

I believe the explanation you used in the Cosmos series about how the carbon trapped is being released and causing warming was the most straightforward ever presented on TV. How can we use similar methods to educate the populace so they start challenging the politicians?