Solar energy stocks have been doing well ever since the federal election results back in November. With the prospect of new, green-friendly legislation now coming soon, renewable energy companies have seen their shares soar significantly over the past few weeks. As it turned out, solar stocks jumped even more on Thursday after President Biden ended up blocking the Keystone XL pipeline while also planning to sign new environmental regulations as well.
The news marks the end of a 12-year saga, in which Canadian crude from the oil sands was originally to be shipped into the U.S. but has been blocked by political parties on both sides of the border over the years. Now, however, with Biden elected as President, it seems that this long-awaited pipeline won’t be materializing after all, with him blocking the previous approval granted by President Trump back when he was first elected into office.
An announcement first issued a couple of days ago read that Biden plans to revoke “permits signed over the past 4 years that do not serve the U.S. national interest, including revoking the Presidential permit granted to the Keystone XL pipeline.” Additionally, Biden said that he was planning to rejoin the Paris climate agreement in the near future as well. Biden ran on a few major issues, one of which being a much stronger emphasis on renewable energy projects in the United States.
As to be expecting, traditional oil and gas companies ended up falling a fair bit in response to the news, while solar and renewable energy stocks jumped. Among the biggest winners included companies like SunPower (NASDAQ: SPWR), which rose by around 17.2% over the course of the day.
Over the past six months, SunPower has jumped over 300%, a similar trend seen with most other solar stocks as well, although perhaps not to the same extent. Similar solar companies that also jumped include SunWorks (NASDAQ: SUNW), Maxeon Solar (NASDAQ: MAXN), and Canadian Solar (NASDAQ: CSIQ), which shot up around 25.7%, 12.0%, and 8.2%, respectively.
For political reasons, most analysts are now incredibly optimistic about the future for solar stocks going into 2021. However, many individual stocks in this market still are lacking in terms of business fundamentals, whether that’s a lack of profitability or something else. In particular, SunPower has only four Wall Street analysts that are actually bullish about the stock, while a whopping nine are still “neutral.” There are also three analysts that are outright bearish on the company, despite what’s going on politically in the U.S. right now.
SunPower Company Profile
SunPower Corp is a vertically integrated solar module manufacturer and systems installer. The company’s modules derive from crystalline silicon technology and possess the industry’s highest conversion efficiencies (the percentage of sunlight that is converted into electricity). French oil giant Total is now SunPower’s majority shareholder. The operating business segments of the company are SunPower Energy Services and SunPower Technologies.. The maximum revenue of the company comes from SunPower Energy Services Segment, which includes sales of solar energy solutions in the North America region, and direct sales of turn-key engineering, procurement and construction services. – Warrior Trading News
