Not to hijack the thread, but I figured this might be a good place to make my first post in awhile. In case you all were wondering, I ended up in a rehab back in March because my parents thought I might be alcoholic (so of course this has turned into a beer thread) and then a longer-term place until finally getting out last week. I'm probably not alcoholic but am giving sobriety a chance for now. It was certainly a frustrating but humbling experience.
Fortunately, I got a decent contract job back in DC in the energy sector and I was also able to start some interesting freelance work I had on hold since March that's going well, so I think I'm finally in a good situation career-wise. That won't leave with me with nearly as much downtime as I've had in the past, so I probably won't be posting here nearly as often, but it'll be good to be busy.
Thankfully, I was still able to watch a lot of college football, so I've been enjoying that, especially with how Michigan has been playing.
As for the original topic, as I've said before on the energy side of things, renewables are going to win out over time. Coal has already peaked with no new plants compared to a wave of retirements in the US and elsewhere. Gas generation is just the intermediate solution. A big reason that GE has tanked is that they bet too hard on fossil fuel technologies. Electrification (and automation) of the transportation sector (among others) is about to take off (Tesla's problems aside), which will help lower the cost of batteries and potentially other energy storage technologies, which will make it even easier to integrate renewables, and consequently the oil industry will start going downhill, too. Not to get political, but everything that Trump has done and is trying to do to prevent this is only delaying the inevitable transition. The economics are what matter most, of course. The big wildcard is the potential of small-scale nuclear systems, if they become economical. I'm skeptical of that in the short-term but we'll see. Waste-to-energy becoming a player is more plausible, though....
