Clean Energy that pays a dividend and has opportunity for growth...

Southern Company (SO) and Exelon (EXC) are both two energy producers with nuclear energy production capacity.  Both companies currently pay a +5% annual dividend and have room to grow.

Consider the current state of our economy; it is slowly coming back, but has taken a big hit over the last 2 years.  As a result many businesses have scaled back or gone out of business.  Households have tightened their spending because of more restricted budgets.  This impacts the consumption of energy.  Therefore, as the economy rebounds, energy usage should too.

Secondly, the EPA is increasing its squeeze on coal power producers with increased emissions controls.  Thus, producers of stable and clean power stand to benefit as some coal plants are taken offline.

This past February the Obama administration approved an $8.3 billion loan guarantee for Southern Company’s construction of two nuclear reactors in Georgia.  Consider this and the fact that a large percentage of the power in the south is derived from coal power plants and you can see how SO might be finding themselves in a pretty sweet spot.

Two other clean energy companies to consider…

Chemical & Mining Co. of Chile (SQM) – The company mainly deals with agricultural fertilizers, but they also mine lithium.  Actually, they hold about 1/3rd of the worlds known supply of lithium.  This matters because many battery powered devices used lithium batteries.  Think of all the cars coming online that are electric or some type of hybrid.  They will run on batteries and many of them will be lithium batteries.  SQM could cash in huge if a significant up-tick in the demand for lithium occurs.

Ormat Technologies (ORA) – A producer of geothermal power and developer of geothermal extraction technologies.  As the push for clean energy continues one area that is seeing an increasing amount of interest is geothermal power.  Ormat is the largest pure play on geothermal.  They own a number of properties that are potential sites of geothermal power generation, they operate their own geothermal power plants and they plan and build geothermal power plants for other companies.  If geothermal catches on in the US or outside of the US, they are going to be part of the action. (I own ORA)

As always, use this blog as a starting point and then go out and do your own research.