Book Review: The Green Investing Handbook, Nick Hanna

An investment guide to renewable energy technologies, the recent ?Green Investing Handbook? by Nick Hanna, provides a good overview for people looking at investments in the renewable energy sector.

In the recently published book ?The Green Investing Handbook?, the author Nick Hanna is providing a rather detailed investment guide to companies in the renewable energy space. The book seems to be mostly aimed at individual and private investors as it can only scratch the surface on some of the technologies.

The book looks at renewable energy funds and how to build a ?green portfolio?. Then in the chapters on ?where to invest?, it is looked at the different renewable energy types. Naturally everyone has a different view space and ordering of the different renewable energy types, geothermal clearly gets the least space. But then again for outsiders and individual investors the geothermal energy sector is hard to grab.

It then provides a rather thorough and interesting directory of listed companies, green funds and indices, as well as Green investment funds.

The book describes in short geothermal energy and its application types, but only for power generation clearly overlooking the big market for geothermal direct use. But it covers geothermal heat pumps as part of the ?green building? chapter. The ?companies to watch? looks at Potter Drilling and Geysir Green Energy (both private companies), overlooking a number of very interesting geothermal players e.g. from Australia, Europe, the U.S. and other countries in the hot regions of the world.

It is generally difficult being biased towards geothermal energy and not being critical about the lack or limitation of presence that geothermal gets, so one needs to be fair. It gives a good overview on geothermal, but not providing much substance to the sector with regards to development and the individual opportunities within the sector, particularly when it comes to direct use, e.g. for heating, heat applications etc. So from a geothermal energy perspective I find the chapter on it too short and not going into much depth.

But, all in all the book gives a very good and concise overview on the overall renewable energy sector, players, funds etc. So it is a good handbook when quickly wanting to understand and get a grip on renewable energy technologies.

Lastly, I am naturally a bit dissappointed for ThinkGeoEnergy not appearing in the ?resources? section for geothermal energy, but hey that?s life.