Page 88 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

Rental generator lineup & power modules onsite
EPG: GENERATORS
On December 31, 1999, every rental generator in the country was out on loan. The Y2K (year 2000) panic had everyone on edge, waiting for a com- puter glitch to take down the entire power grid. “Y2K was a big scare that nobody could confirm or deny,” says George Schalk, current Power Rental general manager, who was working for Aggreko at the time. “Every generator was gone during that period. Aggreko was out. Cummins was out. Pe- terson was out. There wasn’t a single rental gener- ator available.” Peterson field techs were also out, working around the clock that New Year’s Eve to monitor the situation. In the end, Y2K turned out to be a non-event, but nobody could afford not to have backup power... just in case. “We had half a million dollars’ worth of rental generators directly attributable to the Y2K crisis,” says Jeff Goggin, then-president of Peterson Power Systems.
Over the past twenty-five years, the Silicon Val- ley has been a defining part of Peterson’s Bay Area personality. Emerging businesses and giants in the technology sector have all fueled Peterson’s elec- tric power generation (EPG) business. “These big companies can’t afford to have a power outage,” says Schalk. “They all have backup generators on-
86 | PETERSON: 85 YEARS AND GOING STRONG