Download Nice Energy
Julieta Bassette
The initiative engages diverse stakeholders to focus on full-scale nuclear for baseload electricity as well as innovative, next-generation technologies and integrated renewable-nuclear energy systems across four key areas:
The NICE Future initiative developed a set of fact sheets that provide high-level information on the potential role of nuclear energy in current and future clean energy systems, providing information on the overarching benefits of nuclear energy, the scale of technologies available, and opportunities to provide clean energy for the grid, industry, and transportation.
Breakthroughs: Nuclear innovation for clean energy systems tells how nuclear innovation is an enabler of clean energy systems globally. This book is intended as a starting point for examining how nuclear energy can complement broader clean energy systems and is focused on innovation happening today in the global nuclear industry. Learn more about the book here
In addition to many activities on youth and women in nuclear, NICE also created an expert group to research the impacts on social equity and economic empowerment (RISE3). RISE3 provides expert resources and creates a blueprint for countries transitions to a clean and just energy economy with nuclear innovation as a key pillar.
Imagine life without refrigeration, television, clean cooking facilities, clean water, clothes washers, and electric lights. For the roughly 1 billion people around the world without access to electricity, energy poverty is a reality that drastically reduces their quality of life and economic opportunities.
At the same time, fossil fuels currently provide more than 60 percent of electricity and about 80 percent of energy worldwide, even as global carbon dioxide levels are higher than at any point in at least the past 800,000 years.
Our monthly updates of long/short ETF trades noted the clean energy sector has been a particularly weak performer (Table 1). The clean energy sector is down 12.7% since inception; excluding this sector, the portfolio is up 2.7%. Only one clean energy position, GRID, has posted a positive return since its inception.
The first problem with our clean energy trades is that we entered them in August 2021 at what, in retrospect, was a market high point (Chart 1). These ETFs rallied further in November when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) held its annual meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, to reaffirm the climate goals of the 2015 Paris meeting.
As is often the case with investing, timing is a key variable. Ongoing disappointments about progress on limiting climate change and the massive selloff of 2022 have weighed heavily on clean energy ETFs.
Apart from holding a lot of losers, there is little information on why PBW has performed so poorly. The ETF manager provides a quarterly report (the latest version runs 137 pages), but it provides no insight into that key question. That said, it does provide an impressive analysis of the current energy and clean energy market. We suggest investors interested in this sector use it to identify quality names among the dross and stick with single names rather than hold PBW.
We entered these trades on the strength of systemic factors that we expected would gain momentum. We were overly optimistic about the clean energy transition and did not foresee the impacts of Covid. We were also naïve about the nature of ETFs and how many are effectively black boxes that make it difficult to understand what is driving their performance.
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