The smell hit me before the tour even started. Hot paint, cutting oil, and that sharp diesel tang that gets into your clothes and stays there for a da…

Last month a site manager at a remote mine camp called me at about ten at night. A 400 kVA set he’d bought through a dealer two years earlier ha…

The salesman poured the tea, laid out three brochures, and said the tour would take twenty minutes. It took two hours. Not because the factory was big…

The phone rang at 2:14 in the morning. A client’s warehouse was pitch black — typhoon outside, substation down — and their beautiful, expensive …

Last spring I stood in a limestone quarry at six in the morning, watching a crane swing a brand-new “heavy-duty industrial” genset onto a …

Two years ago a buyer called me with two quotes on his desk. Both said 250 kVA. Both said diesel. One was $28,000. The other was $19,500 — thirty perc…

Three weeks ago a new customer walked around our demo unit like it was a used car. Tapped the canopy. Kicked the base frame. Then he pointed at the wh…

My cousin called me last spring. His small machining shop outside Suzhou had lost grid power twice in a month, and a salesman had just quoted him a &#…

The call came at 10:40 on a Tuesday night. A contractor I’d sold a 500 kVA set to six months earlier, his voice flat in the way voices get when …

Every few months, someone asks me some version of the same question: “Isn’t diesel dead? Shouldn’t we just go solar with batteries?&…

The storm hit on a Friday evening, right around 7. By 7:20 the whole street was dark, and by 8 the utility company’s recorded message was cheerf…

I once watched a contractor buy a 500 kVA diesel generator for a job site that needed about 180. He liked the price — a dealer was clearing inventory …