Ok, a lousy day on the markets, well probably much worse than that actually, let's call it abysmal. Nevertheless, it has been an opportunity for me to catch up on adding new stocks and an index as informed by one of you, a loyal follower of this blog.

So here they all are;

Terna Energy - wind and hydropower, based in Greece - very like . . .
Innergex Renewable Energy - also wind and hydro, based in Canada

Then I've added;

Acucar Guarani - a brazilian firm which purchases, cultivates and crushes sugarcane to produce sugar, ethanol and electricity.
Arise Technologies Corp - a Canadian solar firm (odd how a semi-arctic nation develops a niche in solar, a bit like Renewable Energy Corp in Norway)
Wacker Chemie AG - a chemical company who has a major silicon feedstock production operation for the solar industry

Finally, many thanks to a gentleman from Thailand who emailed me about a new index not included here. I've just added the HSBC Global Low Carbon Production Index to my list of Global Alternative Energy Indices. From my past experience, I can tell that the data behind most indices constitute an expensive, high margin business to the consumer. That's why - unlike stocks - there's not much more I can tell you about them at this stage other than they exist and list them all in one place. 

My general view is that for an index to succeed and be widely known, especially in a new sector, you have to make the data free and easily available. Surely this is what has given the Wilder Hill Clean Energy Index the renown it has, way ahead of many Blue Chip bank equivalents.

Technically, a bear market kicks in when a given market falls below 20% from its high. So depending on which index you look at, we're already there. As of last night, the Dow Jones is down 14.5%, the Russell 2000 index down 20% and the Nasdaq, 10% off the beginning of the year. 

The question for us is, where are we with alternative energy stocks?

Here's my existing list of Global Alternative Energy Indices - which I suspect is not complete. Email me if you have some others you think I should know about . . . I do read and act on them (thanks by the way, to the person who told me about Arise Technologies Corporation - stock now being added).

Well, I'm going to start with an American index, the Wilder Hill  Clean  Energy Index, because it's still the best known. It's down 24.57% since it's peak on December 26th last year, or about where it was a month earlier in November. So that suggest for its own components, a bear market.

Now back to the global indices. They are quite hard to get data on, as it's usually a premium paid-for service, but here are the ones I have from freely available data.

The Dax Global Alternative Energy Index - see here - again, it peaked in late December at 218.25 and closed last night at 186.44 - so it's down 14.58%. No bear market here then.

The Renixx Renewable Energy Industrial  Index World - see here - hard to read, but the chart suggests a fall from over 1900 to 1400, that's a pretty severe pasting, at least 25% off it's peak.

So I hope that puts you a little bit more in the picture as several newspapers and websites in recent days have been running stories about alternative energy stocks showing big falls.

Let's put this in context.

The important point about the alternative energy sector is that  it has not been driven by Greenspan's cheap credit boom. The drivers to date have been the high price of oil, government regulations and targets, concerns over energy security and the environment and improving technology.

And as far as I can see, none of these have changed in the last month and nor are they about to. But the caveat is that you would have to expect market inflows to drop off substantially during this period of uncertainty for the world economy, because there's less investment money to go around.

Canada, a nation long-overshadowed by its mighty southern neighbour can look forward to some very good years ahead. That Canada has enormous amounts of natural resources that the rest of the world wants; uranium, oil, minerals etc. is  widely known and underscored by the Canadian Dollar reaching parity with the greenback late last year. Much less appreciated though is Canada's quiet but no less significant expansion into alternative energy.

Today's article in Renewable Energy Access "A Snapshot of Canadian Green Power 2007/2008" ought to be a wakeup call to the investment world.  The truth is however that Canada's Stock Exchanges have long been successful in attracting quite a few listings by alternative energy companies both from Canada and abroad. So I've decided to list them all here, in no particular order;

Canadian Firms listing in Canada

VRB Power Systems
Xantrex Technology
Sustainable Energy Technologies
Boralex
Dynetek Industries
Western Geopower
Plutonic Power
Carmanah Solar Technologies
Western Wind Energy
Run of River Power
Canadian Hydro Developers

Canadian Companies listed outside of Canada

Ballard Power Systems
Canadian Solar Inc

Foreign Firms listed on Canadian Exchanges

Nevada Geothermal
Finavera Renewables

Have I missed any out? Please email me if you know some that should be included and I will load them up on AEI.

For Hydro and Wind power potential, it doesn't really get any better than Canada. Vast tracts of largely unpopulated land and water and a relatively low cost of doing business. There has to be a strong bullish case for Canada and its currency over the next decade. And no question, a niche worth watching has to be Canadian alternative energy firms.