Powering Ahead

Established in 1984, Powerplant (Stamford) Limited provides a variety of temporary electrical power solutions across a variety of diverse industry sectors. As the company expanded it moved from its original home at Oakham, to Peterborough before consolidating the company in its present form at Stamford in 1998. The company was sold to the Turner Group by co-founder and managing director Tim Joyce when he retired in 2008, but his son Mark remains as the operations manager.

Today, Powerplant designs, manufactures and reconditions bespoke generators for a huge variety of customers, and operates a large generator fleet that is available on a sale or rental basis. The gen sets are fully maintained from the company’s in-house workshop facility, with ex-rental and refurbished generators resold to the general public.

Each of the company’s gen sets is custom made, and range in size from a single cylinder petrol 3.0 KvA set to a 2,000 KvA V16 set that was recently exported to China. The sets find their way across the globe, with three recently sent to Tanzania, and a further three destined for the Falklands where they will provide the power for the company resurfacing Stanley airport. Customers include Lloyds TSB, Luton Airport, numerous NHS hospitals and the Royal Mail (through a third party.) "Many of the sets are now being installed as a prime power system, instead of being used as the traditional back up,” Mark Joyce explains. “Customers are finding that it is worth running these sets in high tariff times and then selling the excess back to the national grid.”

Mark reports that the events market is still one of the main areas for their hire fleet with construction close behind, although the company has recently diversified into the poultry business with the gen sets being used as back up power for farms. Despite operating its own impressive workshop facility, Powerplant regularly calls upon assistance from Pirtek Peterborough although, unusually, not for emergency on-site hose replacements. “It's not often we need to call Pirtek for field repairs to the gen sets although they obviously provide all of that side of the maintenance service. Where they come into their own is where equipment has to be moved after installation, and of course none of the fuel lines then fit," Mark Joyce concludes. "We've used other companies in the past but we always seem to encounter problems, either they can't respond or they turn up on site without the parts and tools. MSST Craig Thompson always comes up with a solution and finds the right fittings. We run our company on a 'lean and mean' basis and, thanks to Pirtek, we don’t need our own hydraulics expert because we have one right on our doorstep.”