Page 93 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

BIOCHEMICAL INDUSTRY: PHARMACEUTICALS
“There are several large Bay Area R&D facilities where they have ten, twenty, even thirty years’ worth of research living in petri dishes,” says Schalk. “If all of a sudden Genentech or Bayer los- es power, all that work goes down the drain. So they have N+1 backups at each of their facilities, which is an extra backup generator to their backup. We always make sure there’s a backup plan in place in case there’s a power failure. I don’t want to be the guy responsible for losing $10 billion worth of research because the generator threw a belt and we couldn’t get another one out there in time.”
COMMERCIAL BUILDINGS: TRANSAMERICA BUILDING
In 2005,the owners of San Francisco’sTransamerica building contacted Peterson Power about provid- ing temporary cooling for a 48-hour maintenance shutdown. At 48 floors and 853 feet tall, the Trans- america Pyramid was the tallest building on the SF skyline at the time. During the proposed shut-
down, all but one of the floors would be fine. “Bank of America’s main data center occupied the fifth floor, where literally billions of dollars of transac- tions flowed through per minute,” recalls Randy Young. “At the time, it was their worldwide server. And it was tied into the building’s central plant cooling loop, which would be shut down during those 48 hours. Those servers couldn’t afford to be down even for five minutes.”
Young and his crew parked a 200-ton-capacity chiller and generator out in front of the building on Montgomery Street and ran hose up five flights of stairs to the server room’s air handler.“The cross- over was the tricky part since even a slight glitch could expose our equipment to 48 floors worth of pressure, which could rupture the hoses, drain out all the chilled water from the loop, and take those servers off-line for the rest of the weekend.” It was a risk they carefully calculated for and monitored throughout the weekend. “We were their lifeline during that shutdown. Our total function was to keep that server room alive.” Peterson’s TC group completed the job successfully and got called back for the next three years until the owners came up with a permanent solution.
Cooling the San Francisco Transamerica building in 2005
CHAPTER 6 | 91