Last month's Power Gen Show had one major surprise, other than the cold weather in Las Vegas. Optimism. Actually cautious optimism because everyone is still too fragile to be flat out optimistic.

A combination of sets going to Iraq, the Northeast blackout and a hurricane or two, has pretty well flushed out the overbuilt inventory and people are thinking about building new units again.

The growth is definitely in smaller sets. Almost in perfect proportion, the further you move up the kW chart, the slower business is growing. When you get into megawatts, the gas turbines and large recip packages, business is still slow.

Power generation has historically been a steady baseline business for engines and components that has served to even out the ups and downs of the mobile markets. And it isn't going away. Our need for electricity is a necessity, not a luxury.

The underlying story at Power Gen this year, however, was the continued growth of distributed generation/power/energy. We quibbled with the term initially, largely because people were using it to describe any generator set that wasn't at a central utility facility.