Eng12345

This is a crazy take. Restraint has a purpose. Think about how so many later Soviet us conflicts would have ended had Truman not taken the stance he had taken. We would be in a nuclear hell scape.

Gary - a little late and I'm sure you've figured it out, but I was confused on initial reading ~18 months ago. This is AECON - a Canadian construction company. AECOM is a much larger US company.

Yeah but who takes a job like that after 17 years at Merrill Lynch and then subsequently quits a few months later? I may be reading the tarot cards too much but it does seem as if something was materially misrepresented

To Dalals point it does sometimes feel like a case of moving goalposts but I maintain that late 2025 is my personal deadline for MEANINGFUL buybacks

I agree the thesis has not played out but I continue to lose confidence. A big hit to my confidence was when that Andy Siegel report just quit after a few short months. That was pretty telling I think. I wanted to sell a lot of at that point a few weeks ago but it was tactically a bad time. It still remains my second largest position, but I continue to lose confidence and I'm not convinced any of the performance to date is based on company performance rather than market performance. Apologies for the bad punctuation on vacation in Aruba.

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@Spekulatius touches on the realities of the scenario. But I would add that in a make believe scenario where growth and everything else was equal capital light would outperform simply on the basis of cost of capital. In a simplistic view: using money costs money.

Personally - I'm coming to terms recently with the folly of low PE. It sounds like a good endeavor though. I won't have time to partake for sometime. Starting 12s and masters classes tomorrow.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust is receiving Class B shares worth about $4 billion as of Thursday’s closing price, while the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation is receiving about $400 million. Don't you love "journalism"? Tell the whole story WSJ. I'm paying for it.

Whatever the solution is - it will likely be multipronged. Batteries will likely play a big role. To be honest - I didn't realize California has deployed so much batteries this year. There's a lot of other things that can be done besides the generation side - think demand response like shutting stuff down to flatten the curve. The funny thing is that everyone is trying to tell a story. I found this blog to be a good read regarding this when I was trying to catch up on that (frankly I don't trust any source that's touting one generation method over another like pv-magazine). Batteries Taking Charge of the California Grid (gridstatus.io)

- the points you make regarding baseload power, dispatchable power and the need to instantaneously match supply to demand are very simple, make sense and should be easy to understand. So why have we gone of the rails with renewables? Maybe it just gets back to the local needs and politics as you say. Yes - ultimately it goes back to local needs and politics. The electric grid is a fragmented thing and has a lot of interested parties who all form their own opinions. Like I said we can do almost anything - the question is cost. How much are you willing to pay for your electricity? I know personally I don't want to pay much more than I am currently, and I know people who simply can't afford to pay more. On a cost per megawatt hour basis natural gas is simply the cheapest right now - especially once you start considering in all of the various quality factors. - regarding nuclear not being a solution for dispatchable power. Doesn’t it make sense to keep adding nuclear as baseload and having gas / coal as the dispatchable? Additionally do the small reactors terraform/gates is working on solve this problem. Absolutely - the solution to the problem is going to be multipronged. I think of SMRs as essentially breaking up the chunks of ramp rate required similar to an integral. Nonetheless I don't get excited about SMRs - it's not really a new concept, just being flashed around as new. Our forefathers were just as smart, if not smarter than us and there's a reason they didn't go this route. It's not like they didn't have fab shops and stuff to prefab in the 60s. That said - if they can reduce the capital requirements to deploy more nuclear I think we will see a lot more development. Additionally, there's a lot of hub bub around the development costs of nuclear generation. A lot of blame has been fairly put on the NRC, but I think erring on the side of caution is the correct thing to do. I haven't been involved in a nuclear development project but I have a 2x1 combined cycle plant. I once heard a nuclear guy lament and use as an example of NRC incompetence that when they built the steam piping system, they built it from both ends and met up in the middle. He used that as an example of NRC ineptitude because the NRC made them redesign all the piping when it didn't meet up in the middle and was off by 2 feet. But the truth is that was for damn good reason. Steam piping is heavily stressed components and specifically engineered for location. When I was building a 2x1 we started at one end of the steam system and made damn sure everything was on location before moving forward - for specifically that reason the construction must meet design when it comes to any sort of safety critical item. We knew that if it wasnt on location it would have to be restressed. That's why I tend to think a lot of the cost overruns from Vogtle were simply due to poor design and contracting operations less so NRC incompetence. From a high level and without looking closely - theres a reason once bechtel got involved they were able to build it from essentially foundation to firing in 6 years.

Yeah I don't know about the whole crypto thing - I don't know much about crypto or ecoins, but I'm sure there's money to be made there in terms of using the stranded energy. It doesnt seem all that different than what TLNE is doing selling power from Susquehanna Nuclear Station to AMZN for an onsite data center. What's interesting though is in some places we have TOO much generation - you can see this via the LMPs (locational marginal pricing) going negative. Just today I looked at the CAISO LMP map and almost all of them were negative thereby indicating if you were an operator and you added generation to the grid you would be required to pay money for adding generation!

I mean where do I start? The thing that gets missed in all of this green energy debate is that energy is local. One area such as the southwest may be great for solar while in the northeast that is not so true. Why we continue as a nation to pay major subsidies for green energy generation sources in areas that don't make sense is beyond me. Why are we putting solar panels on roofs in the upper northeast? For that matter - every rooftop in Florida should be covered in solar, but it's not because of BAD policy. At this point I'm part convinced its a big capital destruction scheme propagated by propaganda - but ill reign it in. The truth is from an energy stand point - we can do whatever we want technologically the only question is cost and politics. We could cover the sahara in solar panels and feed europe solar power but the cost of doing so and the political risk involved is why you never hear about it. I'm of the mind that electricity generation should be a utility - you shouldnt have to be rich to have reliable 24/7 electricity. Understand when you see something from MISO as the above quote does these are guys who don't have any financial benefit in what generation source is on. They are paid to keep the lights on across the grid, period. The grid is broken up into a few various segments/markets and the simplest way to think about it is PJM is the northeast, MISO the midwest, the infamous ERCOT is Texas, and CAISO is the western us etc. These are the RTO/ISOs which are charged with keeping the lights on. Heres a good resource if you care to learn more about the management structure: Electric Power Markets | Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (ferc.gov) Each one of these RTOs have their own independent regulations that member utilities have to follow and are heavily dominated by various local politics. Understand the electric grid has to run at 60 Hz all of the time. There is more electrical engineering gobledey goop crap to it than that such as reactive power and power factor. But I'm a mechanical, generation side guy so I will keep it simple to avoid the risk of being wrong. In the absence of significant energy storage solutions what that fundamentally means is that load must match generation exactly. So, when you go home at night and flick on your lights or the factory down the road kicks on a big pump, somewhere somehow there must some incremental generation. In the case of you flicking on your lights it probably won't be noticeable, but if the whole city does it at the same time or there is a large change in load because the plant manager down the road came in drunk and started everything up and ran it balls out then it can become noticeable. So what happens if you have too much generation? The frequency starts to rise above 60 Hz - but ultimately the controls will start kicking generators offline causing them to have to go through restarts etc. The opposite is true with low frequency - so you will have to start adding more generation to the grid, but understand even spinning reserves take a couple minutes to ramp up. If a gas turbine is offline, it may take 5-10 minutes (for a modern one) to spin up to full load and really support the frequency. This can be seen to the extreme today in california: Understand the scales that graph is showing are nothing to sneeze at! That is dropping 10 gigawatts of solar generation in the course of an hour! 15 gigs in 4 hours. Understand a singular large scale nuclear reactor-steam generator is usually about 1 gigawatt. So now all of that lost solar generation has to be made up for with dispatchable power. If there's not enough available, then the grid operators will have to simply shut areas down to shed load (rolling blackouts) in order to maintain frequency to prevent a total collapse of the grid. Understand this happens every time a cloud passes over a solar field, or the wind stops blowing. The hidden cost of this whole wind/solar crap is what the utilities are now having to do to maintain frequency! They are having to build synchronous condensers and statcoms like crazy to account for the electrical crap that essentially comes down to maintaining grid frequency! You never see those figures in the cost per megawatt hour. As I type this out I realize nuclear is also probably not the silver bullet that people want it to be. Modulating steam valves to ramp like that is tricky and does severe damage to the valves. Steam is harsh shit and at the speeds it moves will eat away a lot. Im not sure how much NERC would allow that - for good reason. Which is why you always hear nuclear referred to as baseload power, but now certain areas of the country are in a position where they don't need baseload - they need dispatchable power, and I personally don't think that fits. It seems to me certain areas are severely overbuilt in terms of intermittent generation and other areas are severely underbuilt - all due to local politics.

I mean to be fair - saluki already started this topic a few weeks ago here From my long only position it seems like a lot of the opportunity has been closed in terms of value. If we want to just talk about the grid then that's a whole different game, one which I could write for days on.

Can you imagine being the lawyer that had to write this: Attorneys for GEICO disagree. "The Auto Policy does not cover liability for injury caused by the transmission of a sexually-transmitted disease merely on the basis that a covered vehicle was used as a shelter for, or as the situs of, sexual activity," GEICO wrote in its brief. Or being the court reporter for this: "It's foreseeable that people are going to have sex in the car, I mean, that's clearly foreseeable, right?" one of the judges asked. Kinda funny until you realize its ultimately just going to end up with much more restrictive language on automotive policies.