The message is the same across the board from any number of financial reporting sites. Solar stocks, which rose dramatically in the wake of the tsunami-induced Fukushima nuclear accident, will level out again.

solar stocks japan

The crisis won’t quickly boost demand for renewables, argues Michael Obuchowski of First Empire Asset Management, which owns shares of First Solar Inc.

Beacon Equity Research, which provides up-to-the-minute stock trading advice, takes particular note of Ascent Solar Technology, another company that got a lift from the Japanese tragedy but has since fallen back to pre-Fukushima levels.

“While solar energy may eventually be the solution for the world’s energy woes, the time is obviously not now.” Notes one writer, in a particularly obvious instance of misdirection.

Bloomberg, on the other hand, predicts that global solar installations will rise by 2.7 percent, to 18.9 gigawatts this year, after more than doubling last year. Thus, when the Bloomberg Global Leaders Solar Index fell 1.6 percent on Friday, March 18, after leaps of more than 10 percent since March 11 (the day of the tsunami), the idea of a stagnating solar industry begins to seem like wishful thinking from traders who have learned to to track wealth in oil dollars and are not ready to shift that paradigm.

Policy leaders have admitted that the disaster and subsequent fear of nuclear may work to install new subsidies or tax incentives, which have been cut at both the federal and state level during 2009-2010. This has happened in Arizona, California, Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon and Pennsylvania.

What analysts apparently failed to consider was history. After Three Mile Island (TMI, 1979; and again after Chernobyl, 1986), enthusiasm for nuclear power fell so sharply, both in the U.S. and abroad, that this nation built no more than a handful of reactors after the 1970-80 building boom.

While the experts speculate, countries around the world, including the U.S., are again dropping their plans for new nuclear plants, which are more costly than solar and devastating when they fail.

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