Renewable Energy Strategy

Miller Tabak + Co., LLC's investment strategy in the renewable energy space is currently focused on low carbon/low cost solutions for peaking power demand. Photovoltaic (pv) solar power represents a unique investment opportunity as select companies' manufacturing costs continue to decline toward competitive peaking power rates. While natural gas combined cycle plants have historically been the low cost reserve fossil fuel source used to meet incremental mid-day peaking power demand, the technological advances and cost reductions experienced in the pv solar space over the last three years has made for a viable solution that provides reliable clean power.

MT believes that investors remain too cautious on N. American solar market growth and takes a positive stance on low cost pv manufacturers capable of scaling to meet state level renewable portfolio standards in the U.S and feed-in tariff driven EU markets. Moreover, we believe low cost manufacturer's will experience a long growth cycle building and servicing broad commercial rooftop applications in mature EU markets and incremental N. America and Asia-Pac markets into 2011 and beyond. We are most positive on First Solar and Trina Solar for these applications, respectively.

MT provides select coverage of five integrated solar pv manufactures including investment recommendations and actively updated earnings models for each company. MT also proactively researches developing industry trends driving global and region market dynamics and will provide relevant commentary. Solar companies under coverage are First Solar (FSLR), SunPower (SPWRA/B), Trina Solar (TSL), Yingli Green Energy (YGE), and Suntech (STP).

Also, MT is currently ramping coverage in the energy efficiency space. While renewable power generation represents a unique growth opportunity, MT believes gains from optimizing grid efficiency from the demand response side and the build out of smart grid infrastructure to increase transparency on time of day pricing between utilities and the rate base represent another material growth area. Legislature from the local to federal level in the U.S. is targeting increased infrastructure spending that we believe will translate into meaningful growth for meters and information services companies into 2011 and beyond. Moreover, in both the mature renewable EU markets and the growing N. American and Asian markets, smart grid technology is becoming increasingly necessary for managing the variable power loads generated by intermittent sources such as wind and solar. We recently initiated with a Buy rating on Telvent GIT SA (TLVT) to capture exposure of initial N. American market smart grid growth.