Welcome to the New Gilded Age of Gen-Sets
This forecast appeared in the September 2019 issue of Diesel Progress magazine.
SUMMARY. The underlying weak conditions in the global economic picture could put pressure on the North American power generation industry for the remainder of 2019 and through most of 2020. We forecast little or no growth for the industry through 2020.
Even though the power generation production market was up slightly (0.9% in 2018-2019), we see it declining about 1% over the next year.
For those of you a few years removed from your high school U.S. History courses, the original Gilded Age was a period covering the 1870s-1890s that was marked by astonishing economic growth. Driven by the expansion of industrialization in the North and West, facilitated by growing railroad networks, real wages grew an enviable 60%.
But Mark Twain dubbed this period the “Gilded Age” rather than the “Golden Age,” because it was also marked by extreme poverty, and he represented it with gilded, decaying apple. The shiny outward appearance of growth was masking a rotten core of massive inequality.
