Because of oil’s sharp price drop and the global credit crisis, it turns out “green” projects may not be able to get enough real green (from today’s Wall Street Journal):

The prospects of renewable-energy companies soared with oil prices, but the global credit crunch and the easing of energy costs have brought them back to earth with a thud.In the past three months, global renewable-energy stocks tracked by New Energy Finance, a London-based consultancy, have dropped about 45%, compared with a 23% decline in the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the same period.
The sector’s problems have been compounded by the skid in oil prices to below $70 a barrel last week from more than $147 in July. The sudden reversal in crude prices has removed — at least temporarily — a key rationale for investors to pump billions of dollars into alternative fuels, industry analysts say.
The result: At least in the short term, a slew of projects from palm-oil-based biodiesel plants in Indonesia and Malaysia to wind farms and solar projects across the U.S. and Europe may not be able to get funding.
U.S. wind-farm developers, which have commitments to build a record number of projects in 2009, are also scrambling for alternative sources of credit after the troubles of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. and American International Group Inc., both of which were big lenders to the green-energy sector, says Eric Silverman, a partner at law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP in New York.
“The credit crunch deals a negative blow to the whole [wind] sector because it’s heavily dependent on debt financing,” he says.