Bloomberg's Note For The Day -- December 9, 2022

From Bloomberg's daily note:

It isn’t too early to say it’s been a wild year. Few, outside of US intelligence, predicted Russia invading Ukraine (again). Perhaps fewer still had Morocco knocking Spain out of the World Cup. But I doubt anyone at all predicted 2022 ending with oil prices down and the cost of batteries going up.

The pop in battery prices is all supply-led, as prices for raw materials, lithium included, have soared. Demand is not the problem: BNEF has passenger electric vehicle sales climbing 69% this year. Continued inflation could start tugging at demand. But the industry’s capacity for tweaking chemistries and improving manufacturing remains, as do the structural incentives for electrification. Nothing is certain, of course, but we can probably count on batteries being cheaper in a few years than they are today.

Chart of the day, same source:

From Bloomberg Opinion:

Planned utility-scale storage projects would more than triple the amount currently operating in the US by the end of 2025, according to the Energy Information Administration’s latest monthly survey of generators.

California would remain the leading state, but Texas, which could use more batteries to cap power-price spikes on hot summer days, is emerging as a close contender.

That may help explain why NRG Energy Inc., which runs Texas peaker plants that capitalize on those price spikes, made a $5.2 billion pivot into home-management systems this week with its offer for Vivint Smart Home Inc.

Me? My opinions are diametrically opposite of those above. 

Vivint?

I know nothing about Vivint, but looking at the Yahoo!Finance chart,

• ticker symbol: VVNT (NYSE)
• it appears Vivint went public in 2020 with a share price of $10, immediately popping to an all-time high of $26.54 / share
• dropped to a low of $3.51 this past summer (July, 2021)
• barely moved after the NRG announcemnt
• currently trading at $12
• no dividend (as one would expect)
• market cap: $2.54 billion
• NRG will pay $5.2 billion