Page 113 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

Together we do what we couldn’t do alone
George Schalk, Peterson Power’s rental manager, has spent years waking up to early morning calls like that. He and his crew understand the urgency their customers face in a crisis. They understand that time is mon- ey—sometimes even lives. “When we get that call, I’m pulling my team together. I’ll call our service depart- ment and our inside rental people. I call James Gray, our rental operations manager, at all hours of the night. It doesn’t matter. We answer the phone for each other because we rely on each other. This is a 24-hours-a-day, weekends and holidays kind of job. We’re a team. We make it happen for our customers.”
If they didn’t, someone else would be getting those middle-of-the-night calls.
Much of Peterson Power Rental’s workload centers around emergency response—getting a generator onsite within hours of the initial call and the customer back up and running. But in 2019, a whole new avenue opened up for Peterson from one of its largest customers. Northern California’s utility company decided to use a proactive strategy to combat the devastating, large scale fires that were sweeping the state. But they needed help to make it happen.
ENTER PUBLIC SAFETY OUTAGES
After weeks of analysis and consideration, the utility decided to use a new risk mitigation plan they called Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS). They routinely did planned shutdowns for equipment maintenance, but this was something entirely different. The PSPS strategy was announced to the public in early June 2019 as a pre-emptive safety measure that would cut power to high-risk areas ahead of extreme weather events. “They decided that when a high wind warning comes through—or other extreme weather that could create distur- bance in the lines—it’s better to cut power and eliminate the risk of failure,” explains Schalk.
“When the utility kills power to those at-risk lines, that shuts off power to all the towns downstream. So now, rather than bringing in multiple 2 MW units to act as a substation, they bring in multiple smaller generators to build a patchwork of hubs throughout the community. One unit will go to the grocery store; another might go to the library or the high school; another to the gas station. It’s designed to keep the basic needs of the community running until the PSPS is over and the grid is fully restored.”
THE KICKOFF: PSPS-1
The first significant pre-emptive PSPS happened June 8th–9th, 2019. It affected roughly 22,000 customers across five counties of the North Bay Area and Sierra Nevada Foothills. “The public was stunned, because that sort of thing just doesn’t happen here in California,” says Schalk. “After all, we’re the fifth largest economy in
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