WUEG February 2016 Newsletter

February 2016
Billionaire David Tepper also tried to sue
SunEdison, and his dispute was over the
acquisition of Vivint Solar. Tepper’s company,
Appaloosa Management holds a 10% stake in
SunEdison’s yieldco, TerraForm Power. In the deal
to purchase Vivint Solar, TerraForm Power would
contribute $799 million of the $840.6 million
necessary to make the purchase, and Tepper
believed that this would be unfair to the
shareholders of TerraForm Power. Although
Tepper did not win his lawsuit, he did create
uncertainty in SunEdison’s shareholders, causing
the stock price to drop.
In fact, the deal with Vivint Solar was one of the
key events that sent SunEdison’s stock
plummeting. Last summer, as SunEdison was
peaking in its stock price, it attempted to close the
deal with Vivint Solar, but didn’t seem to have
enough capital to do so. This worried investors,
and the stock price began to plummet. The Vivint
Solar trade still hasn’t gone through, and even if
SunEdison does make the acquisition, there is no
guarantee that SunEdison will be in the clear.
SunEdison expanded too aggressively, and now it’s
facing the consequences. They only have $619
million in cash, and large amounts of projects,
amounting to nearly 2.9GW of energy, that still
require investment to be completed. SunEdison’s
struggles come in contrast to the rest of the solar
industry, where most investors are optimistic as a
result of America’s pledge to reduce emissions by
28% by 2025. SunEdison may have bit off more
than it can chew, and even if they get past all of
their lawsuits, they may be done for good.
Sources:
Fortune
MIT Technology Review
Wall Street Journal
Seeking Alpha
Ukraine’s Energy Grid Hack Renews Cybersecurity Fears
José Del Solar – Member, Academic Committee
Just before Christmas, hackers took down almost a
quarter of Ukraine’s power grid, jamming the
power companies’ phone lines so when customers
called to complain they got nothing but busy
signals. The hackers also sabotaged its
management systems, forcing workers to
physically go to the generators and manually close
breakers that the hackers had remotely opened.
Indeed, the power was back up in a matter of
hours, but the event rekindled fears about the
frightening havoc that power grid cyber-attacks
can wreak.
In 2007, the U.S. government demonstrated how a
power plant generator could be destroyed with
just 21 lines of code by running it hotter than
normal. Admittedly, this would be more difficult
than it sounds, as hackers would likely need to
discover flaws in the systems the power companies
themselves don’t know exist before they could
exploit them. The aging Ukrainian grid, although
far easier to hack, is the reason power was restored
in just a few hours; an attack on the United States
could last weeks. ISIS hackers are attempting to
exploit just this, as they have already tried many
times to take down portions of the U.S. grid. While
they have thus far proved inept, the consequences
of a complete shutdown of an airport’s power or of
the New York energy grid during rush hour, for
instance, are not to be understated.
Hacking Ukraine’s power grid itself was not
particularly difficult but the logistics and planning
were extremely sophisticated, which is why
experts deemed it a coordinated international
attack. Military spokesman Andriy Lysenko stated
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