Southwest Wyoming is the site of a major generator manufacturing plant where 6,000 generators a year are expected to be built and put on the market to meet the growing demand for more power.
Mesa Power Solutions recently opened a new $70 million 220,000-square-foot plant in Evansville along Interstate 80. An energy hedge funded headed by the late oil legend and Oklahoma native T. Boone Pickens Jr. helped a group of military veterans start the company with financial backing from BP Capital.
Since then, the home has become a powerhouse with 30 locations across the nation serving customers in every oil basin, Cowboy State Daily reported. Six years ago, the firm realized the difficult challenge of hiring 150 engineers to come to Casper where the firm got its start, so it relocated headquarters to Loveland, Colorado, just across the state line.
Mesa Power Solutions Director of Assembly Josh Wilson said the manufacturing plant is humming and busy with workers as it attempts to meet the expanded power demands across the U.S.
“Our new markets are in the commercial industrial space — large climate-control facilities at like a grocery store or like a warehouse,” Wilson told Cowboy State Daily. “We’re doing a lot of standby applications like that.”
They’re also working with larger utility companies such as Xcel Energy or Black Hills Energy to help them build microgrids that can more quickly boost power when demand is hot.
“You look at somewhere down in like Texas, where your normal peaking time of the day is 3 to 7 p.m., and it’s 120 degrees and everyone’s cranking their air conditioner and sometimes the grid can’t keep up,” Wilson said. “So what a lot of those utility companies have been doing is putting pads of generators that they call microgrids in those substations. During peak hours, they’re able to turn those generators on to push more power so that everybody can use what they want.”
He said for the first 10 years of its lifespan, Mesa Power Solution’s main customer was the oil and gas industry. Power companies struggled to extend power to them on the prairie, so they had a demand for mobile power units that could be driven to a location on a reinforced trailer.
