Solar stocks and sector-related exchange traded fund surged Wednesday on bets that the Democrat sweep in the Georgia Senate runoff election could help promote more aggressive green spending.
The Invesco Solar ETF (NYSEArca: TAN) was among the best performing non-leveraged ETFs of Wednesday, rising 9.8%.
Election results in Georgia showed Democrat Raphael Warnock taking over incumbent Republican Kelly Loeffler for one of Georgia’s U.S. Senate seats. In Georgia’s other U.S. Senate runoff, Democrat Jon Ossoff was also leading Republican David Perdue by a narrow margin, but the tally has yet to be finalized.
“Clean-power policies are far more popular than Republican Senate leadership are willing to admit, so a Democratic win in Georgia could pave the way for Biden to aggressively push for a clean-energy package,” Katie Bays, managing director at FiscalNote Markets, a policy consulting company, told Bloomberg.
Green Spending
President-elect Joe Biden previously proposed a $2 trillion green spending plan as part of his climate agenda to achieve a carbon-free power sector by 2035. Two lobbying groups that represent the power sector and the automobile sector are already grouping up to make sure they help guide Biden’s green direction, the Washington Post reports.
Market observers are also growing more bullish on the rising green sector as a more climate-friendly President comes to office.
JP Morgan analyst Paul Coster said in the company’s December Alternative Energy Outlook that “the falling cost per watt of renewable energy…positions wind and solar as the lowest-cost source of energy in approximately 70% of the world (BNEF estimate),” Business Insider reports.
“As low-cost batteries layer into the utility-scale wind and solar, we look to zero-carbon electricity to be competitive with fossil fuels as both energy and dispatchable capacity,” Coster added.
For more information on the renewables space, visit our renewable energy category.