The call came at 1:40 in the morning. Tower down, mountain pass, sixty kilometers of switchbacks in the rain. By the time I got there the battery bank…

The first time I walked into a hospital electrical room, the facilities manager didn’t shake my hand. He pointed at a 1.25 MW diesel genset sitt…

Tuesday, 2:14 in the morning. A mid-size colocation hall lost its utility feed — storm, substation fault, nobody pinned down which. The UPS caught the…

A contractor called me at 7:15 on a Friday morning last spring. His tower crane was supposed to go up Monday, and the site’s temporary power con…

The call came at 1:40 in the morning. A buyer I knew — runs a logistics yard — had paid extra for a “silent” 250 kVA set and parked it alo…

It rained sideways for six hours in that port city. At two in the morning my phone buzzed — a site manager I’d sold a 400 kVA set to two years e…

The email came in at 1:47 in the morning. A buyer — let’s call him Daniel, since that’s not his name — was about to sign off on twelve 400…

Two winters ago an ice storm took our street down for 31 hours. My neighbor Tom — two doors down, big house, bigger worries — had a brand-new diesel g…

The concrete trucks were already lined up when the pump died. 2 a.m., a foundation pour, and our rental set started hunting — revving, sagging, revvin…

A few years back I walked into a stone quarry to commission a 500 kVA set, and the first thing I heard was wrong. Three-phase crushers fed off a singl…

A client called me on a Tuesday morning with that tone. You know the one. He’d found a two-year-old 400 kVA set listed at barely half of new pri…

Last spring a contractor emailed me three quotes for a 500 kVA diesel generator set. Cheapest: forty-something thousand. Most expensive: seventy-somet…