Page 104 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

CREATING A NICHE
Four years earlier, in 1999, Gene Hamilton was busy studying the utility market just before Cal- ifornia’s energy crisis hit. “It’s not like the power crisis was a surprise. All you had to do was read the right newspapers.” Hamilton attended dozens of regulatory meetings with the Energy Commis- sion, Air Quality Management District, California Public Utilities, PG&E, and the Cal ISO trying to determine how Peterson could provide tem- porary power to help them with the anticipated power shortfall. He saw proposal requests for phe- nomenal amounts of power in California with fast turnarounds. Knowing the state expected a clean solution, he got in touch with Solar Turbines in San Diego and invited Caterpillar to join in. Pe- terson and Cat Rental Power bought the first four Solar T60 mobile natural gas turbines1—at 5.2 megawatts and $2.5 million each—and launched into the rental turbine market, a market that didn’t even exist yet. Caterpillar’s only caveat was that Peterson handle the marketing and logistics, effec- tively making Peterson Power Systems the source for mobile turbine rentals, with a global territory.
1 Cat Rental Power, part of Cat’s engine division, helped develop the power rental market in the late 1990s by building a fleet of chillers and turbines and making them available to Cat dealers for re-rent. They depended upon dealers to rent, store, and maintain the equipment.
Top to bottom: Markham turbine installation in Toronto in 2003;
Jeff Goggin/R with Larry Moffat/Toromont-Cat, at the Markham site; Commissioning team led by Brian Kennedy/L in 2003
102 | PETERSON: 85 YEARS AND GOING STRONG