Page 95 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

“We would bring in temporary power and cool air so they could get started making money until the stationary equipment was installed,” says Schalk, “because at a million dollars a day, they wanted to open for business ASAP. All that temporary equipment came out of our TC rental fleet.”
And the list goes on: cooling fish hatcheries in Shasta and Oroville dams during the drought; building high-temp thermal heaters for the Tar Sands fields of Alberta, Canada; cooling compo- nents for wing segments in Boeing’s Raptor pro- totype project in Seattle; cooling seawater wave tanks to test how to collect oil spills in the Arctic; and cooling down actors on movie sets like Bicen- tennial Man, Cat Woman, and The Fantastic Four.
Today, Peterson’s temperature control group covers most of California on up into Canada, including whatever the local Cat dealers aren’t interested in pursuing. “We’ve got agreements with several Cat dealers to supply and re-rent equipment to them, utilizing their own generators,” says Schalk. “L.A. is like grabbing the tail of a dinosaur. It’s four times the size of our Northern California market. And it’s a startup operation for us so it’s very com- petitive.”
RENTAL TURBINES:
PARKING LOTS OF POWER (2000–2018)
In 2000, Peterson Power Systems jumped into a brand-new market to address the growing need for clean temporary power. The turbine rental market was created to meet customer demand for “park- ing lots of power,” as the district manager for Solar Turbines, Jack Plescia, called it. Gene Hamilton, Peterson’s gas turbine sales rep at the time, de- veloped a close working relationship with Plescia over the years, building Peterson’s presence in the turbine business all across the world. “The largest portable diesel engine we rent in a single package is two megawatts,” said Hamilton, back in 2009. “These turbines are five megawatts. The difference
is, they’re clean energy. You can leave them run- ning for six months straight and never take them off-line and they will do five megawatts the entire time. These Solar turbines are as tough as nails. They’re bulletproof.”
Top to bottom: Gene Hamilton with Bruce Baxter of Toromont at Markham site in 2003; Markham mobile turbine power plant in Toronto.
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