Page 103 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

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TURBINES
PETERSON’S CLEAN POWER
The power went out at exactly 4:12 in the afternoon.
“I knew something was wrong because all the traffic lights were out and people’s cellphones started
ringing all at once,” says Jeff Goggin, Peterson Power’s president in 2003. At the time, he was on a bus filled with utility managers visiting Toronto’s power plants. “At that point, we thought it was just a local outage.” Turns out, it wasn’t.
Goggin was in Toronto with Gene Hamilton—Peterson’s gas turbine sales rep at the time—and a group of other industry officials to celebrate the commissioning of the new Markham 98 MW mobile turbine power plant. Peterson had nineteen Solar turbines there to offset an anticipated power shortfall that had been fore- cast for the summer and fall of 2003. When the news hit the public the next morning, everyone was stunned. Fifty-five million people were without power in the Northeast and Canada. It would turn out to be one of the largest blackouts in U.S. history.
Hamilton skipped the celebratory dinner that night to work with the technicians and engineers to override the systems’ safeguards and allow the turbine utility breakers to close. By five o’clock the next morning, Peter- son’sturbineswereabletofireupandstartfeedingpowerbackintothegrid,aidingtherecovery.Theyran24/7 for six days straight until the crisis was over. “This was truly an unprecedented failure,” says Goggin. “Initially, I didn’t know how big it was. Several of the people at the walk-through were grid managers, so they knew. The irony is that those turbines were there to prevent exactly what happened. By being in the right place at the right time, they were part of the solution to the Northeast Blackout of 2003.”
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