Page 87 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

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RENTAL: POWER GENERATION POWER WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT
Without energy, industry cannot exist. That’s the whole reason behind Peterson Power’s Rental Division, which rents backup power for emergencies, repair contingencies, and standby power. Backup power isn’t a luxury anymore. It takes less than a second of interruption to shut down an entire manufacturing plant for hours, with millions of dollars in lost revenue. Ten years’ worth of research in the Biotech industry can be lost in minutes because of temperature variance caused by a power failure. Big dot-coms and data centers store the world’s data in their facilities so we can rest easy knowing our information is secure. “Our customers are selling security and reliability to their customers,” says Jeff Goggin, Peterson’s COO. “And we are their backup.”
Peterson Power’s current rental fleet includes generators, air compressors, temperature control systems, and ancillary equipment. It covers the entire Peterson territory of Northern California up through southern Wash- ington. But it started out small—very small. In 1988, Peterson Power’s rental fleet was just an assortment of generators, cables, and switchgear for the EPG (Electric Power Generation) market. “Our rental fleet was stuff that our engineers had made a specifications mistake on or a job had gotten canceled,” says Roger Wood, former Power Rental manager. “Back in 1991 when I took it over, it wasn’t a designated fleet. Basically, any- thing we didn’t sell we put into our rental fleet and tried to rent it down so we could sell it. My biggest goal, at that point, was to hit a million dollars in rental.”
By 1996, Power’s rental business was really kicking. “We were growing like gangbusters by the mid-to-late ’90s,” recalls Wood. “We were doubling every three or four months, from two million dollars to four, to eight. And then came 2001. We hit thirty million that year because of Y2K and the California energy crisis. It was a huge year for us. In 2002, we dropped back down to seventeen million but that was just back to normal.”
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