Daily Energy Standup Episode #253 – Navigating EV Charging Woes and Goldman Sachs’ Commodity Confidence

Highlights of the Podcast

00:00 – Intro
01:53 – I Visited Over 120 EV Chargers: Three Reasons Why So Many Were Broken
05:19 – Goldman Sachs forecasts higher returns on commodities
07:37 – Markets Update
08:42 – Oil prices dive on big US crude stock build, record output
10:07 – Outro

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Video Transcription edited for grammar. We disavow any errors unless they make us look better or smarter.

Michael Tanner: [00:00:15] What is going on, everybody? Welcome to another edition of the Daily Energy News Beat Stand up here on this gorgeous Thursday, November 16th, 2023. As always, I’m your humble correspondent, Michael Tanner, coming to you from an undisclosed location here in Dallas, Texas, rocking a solo show today. Stu is out on assignment, so I am filling in for him, but we still have a excellent podcast lined up for you. As always, Energy news beat is rocking with all of your stories. I’ve got to before we jump into finance. The first one is I visited over 120 EV chargers. Three reasons why so many were broken. This is a Wall Street Journal piece in which they went and visited a bunch of different EV chargers and really broke down the issues surrounding it. Really great piece. We’ll cover it quickly. And then Goldman Sachs, they increased their forecast for higher returns on commodities. Kind of interesting. We’ll dive into what they’re saying the future of the commodity business might look like in the 12 month horizon. So very fascinating. We love a good bullish Goldman Sachs. Then we’ll kick over. I quickly cover what happened in finance today, guys. We’ve got markets up reacting to a lot of different stuff. Our oil prices take a little bit of a dive off some EIA news and then we’ll quickly let you guys get out of here and start your day. But before we do that guys as always check us out online world’s greatest website www.energynewsbeat.com the team do a great job curating that website Make sure it is up to speed with everything you need to be at the tip of the spear when it comes to the energy business. Apple Podcasts. Spotify. YouTube at Energy News Beat Dashboard.EnergyNewsBeat.com Data News Combo Property Email the show question and an energynewsbeat.com. [00:01:52][96.9]

Michael Tanner: [00:01:53] But let’s go ahead and dive into it. I visited over 120 EV chargers. Three reasons why so many were broken. This is again from the Wall Street Journal. I want to try to find the author here. It was a lady. She wrote it on here either way. Oh, Joanna Stern. Okay. So she went ahead in Los Angeles and hit up 30 fast charging locations or public electric vehicle, fast charging locations in Los Angeles County. She did that in a rivian r1t and found that 40% of them had problems. So this is in public EV chargers clearly not working out. You know, she says it’s a Ford Mustang mach-e driver. I’m no stranger to these frustrations. Many of you shared your charging horror stories and me since I began my EV adventure. I said, Let’s go ahead and dive into this. They visited 30 EV charging stations. 13 of them had issues. Here was the first problem. Some of them were just flat out of order. So of the 126 stalls that she inspected, 27 of them were out of order. They either had a sign, a dead screen ordered air, a reading, a test charger unavailable. A producer can can fly that in there. Is this charger unavailable out of service? Caution. Sorry. Out of service. Not good. All of these companies told me that they have network operators currently monitoring them. 24 seven and when problems pop up, they deploy technicians to assess if the issues or what was wrong with these particular machines could be one of many things. The key is it takes a while to get that turned around. Solution. I love how they always try to put this Lunar New Year needed obviously better gear that works. This is my favorite problem to have it rejected. You get it all worked out, but you can’t swipe your credit card. Technology has been around for decades. We can’t figure out how to get it on EVs. It’s just hilarious. Okay, what’s the solution? Upgrade the apps. Genius. Genius. Finally, the third one, this is interesting and I think is is one of the reasons why scaling EVs from a regulatory standpoint might be necessary is the handshake failure, which is basically the connection to you and your EV to the fast charging doesn’t quite work for whatever reason. It could be a software issue, it could be a timeout, it could be a bunch of your things to The point is you can get it connected. You pull up, it takes your car, but boom, it’s not transferring. And I mentioned this may be where in order to push some of this stuff forward, there needs to be a little bit of I don’t want to say government regulation, but in agreement among makers, can we create a single plug and play charger? I know that they’re working on it, but some people have different combinations. There’s the combined charging system that’s integrated into most non-tech. The problem is Tesla’s different, but most of non Tesla EVs, including the Rivian, require a quick shake. It basically it’s this new combines them so they’re working on it all comes back to the point we are really far away from EV rollouts and people want to go quickly and phase out gas vehicles when 14 I promise you 14% of gas stations are not offline. I just promise you that. So this is again, people talk about EVs don’t work. Well, the problem is that there’s a lot of downstream issues when it comes to EVs. Obviously, we’ve covered extensively the grid, but really this EV charges players 120 EV chargers, 40% of them out of work. Great work. Got to love it happened. Let’s go to Goldman Sachs here. Title this article Goldman Sachs forecasts higher returns on commodities colored me shocked Goldman Sachs thinks. Commodities are going to have high returns. The Jeff Currie Law is strong, my friend. [00:05:19][205.5]

Michael Tanner: [00:05:19] Let’s let’s see what it says here. Goldman Sachs expects increased returns of commodities over the next 12 months, buoyed by higher spot prices and easing monetary policy and recession fears, while asset class also strains on hedging against geopolitical suppliers. Man That was written by somebody who just knew a lot of that’s what we call Fed speak right there. Good for you guys. Here’s their actual numbers. You the bank’s going to go and forecast to 21% return on the overall commodity sector over a 12 month horizon on their oil heavy S&P, GSI commodity index, that’s led by 31%, specifically from energy and about 17.8% from the other industrial metals. I love this little random comment they throw in the article here as I’m looking at it. Well, the index has fallen 0.8% so far this whole year on rising oil prices. Got to love it, folks. It’s absolutely insane. So Goldman Sachs, here’s their quote in the in just a note. They’re not dealing with Jeff Kerrigan. No one’s really putting their name on this stuff now we recommend going long combines. Got to love it though. If you’re going to go low you might I feel bad not wanting to go long commodities because I love it 129 oil I am all for I’d love to see it If you’re Goldman Sachs, they recommend going quote long commodities in 2024 as we expect someone to higher spot commodity prices from an improving cyclical backdrop, significant carry returns from structural taro see hedging value against negative supply shocks. Again, that’s just a bunch of godly goober, but I think they’re on to something in terms of if inflation does start to cool. We’ve seen what we’re talk about some of the new numbers that have just dropped that are sort of leading to an ease and a boom in the stock market. And I wouldn’t say boom, but we’ve seen the last two days of increases so far considering that we will also now see OPEC led cuts specifically by Saudi Arabia over the next year. As they’ve come out and said in the last few days, they’re not wrong to say commodities are probably going to increase if we do eyes, do we see a ton? Do I see a 21% return, specifically 31% from energy? Absolutely not. But there’s there probably about halfway there you could probably see somewhere. And we get we don’t give investment someone doing that 10 to 15%, in my opinion, sounds exactly what it should be. So you know that 17.8 from industrial metals, you know be remiss to say they forecast tightening in copper and aluminum stocks for the next decade, driving up prices in the second half of 2024. So, you know, go ahead and get on that aluminum trend. Got to love it. [00:07:37][137.8]

Michael Tanner: [00:07:37] Let’s quickly get to some finance stuff, guys. S&P 500 up about 6/10 of a percentage point. NASDAQ up about 3/10 of a percentage point, really after some some early morning strong news, mainly followed by two days of great data. We did see the producer price index drop this morning, which is really that gauge of wholesale prices dropped about half a percentage point, our biggest monthly decline since April 2020, which is again, COVID. This again comes a day after the consumer Price Index remained flat, which is two signs that the at least the market is taking, that the Fed may be done raising rates or may begin to even drop rates slightly. I don’t see that necessarily happening these Tuesday session gains and Wednesday’s session gains are really the biggest since April this year. So absolutely good. We’re up more than 7% for the month. A lot of interesting stuff. Cisco Systems saw about 11% drop. But again, looking at kind of that macro macro finance piece, what that does for oil is, is again, as the dollar as the dollar strengthens, we’re going to see prices slightly fall. Now, prices today were down a little bit. [00:08:42][64.5]

Michael Tanner: [00:08:42] Crude oil, WTI currently trading 7654 as we record this here at about 545 on the US, up 15 and I talked to a 1.5% drop with eight with a slightly bigger than expected build in crude oil supply. Remember last week the IEA did not come out because of data systems upgrade and did not decide to release a number. Conveniently, the API said there was an 11.9 million barrel build in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve this week. API yesterday drops a 1.3 million barrel build estimate. IEA in their first week back drops to 3.6 million barrel build. So that delta of about two between the API and the EIA numbers from Tuesday to Wednesday really driving that price down even though we are reacting specifically, even though there is a little bit of a reaction specifically to some of that positive economic news. But I think there’s a lot of mixed signals with oil prices. Again, I go back to Goldman Sachs. I think in the long term they’re right. But I think in the short term there and again, they’re talking about a 12 month forecast. So I think we leave that off revising in the short term. There’s a lot more volatility and I think a lot more a lot more things that we could see happen to drive prices down where in that long run, you’re probably still good to to continue to dump on Goldman Sachs. But hey, I beat up Goldman Sachs enough, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t go ahead and hop on the bullish train. My after hearing this podcast, I’ll probably call me for an intro because they can’t hire enough, enough bull analysts over there. So I will. [00:10:07][84.2]

Michael Tanner: [00:10:07] I’ve got folks, appreciate, you guys checking us out here. World’s greatest podcast energy news beat for Stuart Turley, who’s out? Michael Tanner, guys. We will see you tomorrow. Actually, no, we won’t. This is our last show of the week. You’ll get our weekly recap on or you get a new podcast on Friday from Stu. A couple of things coming out. And then Saturday you hear our weekly recaps. So again, we appreciate everybody checking that out. And we’ll be back in your ears Monday morning. So have a great time, guys. Enjoy this podcast with you on Friday, Enjoy the week recap on Saturday and we will see you folks on Monday for Stuart Turley and Michael Tanner. Folks. [00:10:07][0.0][589.0]

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