Portable generator picks up slack for GAB
Students walk by the Cummins generator located outside the northwest side of the General Academic Building. Dylan Nadwodny | Staff Photographer
Alejandro Medellin | Staff Writer
Despite recent renovations on campus, the General Academic Building is experiencing power failures that have prompted the university to seek alternative power solutions.
Because of these issues, the university rented a portable generator — that trailer outside the GAB — from Cummins Power to power the building in case of emergency.
The generator in question failed to power the GAB during an outage earlier in the semester. Vincent Stippec, utilities manager at the facilities department, said UNT installed the portable generator on Sept. 11 and ran it for five days.
The portable generator is not running now, but is on-hand if needed.
“We experienced some trouble on the permanent generator on the north side of the GAB,” said Stippec. “[We] can’t not have a generator.”
Stippec added there have been portable generators attached to other buildings but are hidden, and not out in the open like the one at the GAB.
The GAB houses Academic Computing and User Services, which is an integral part of the university.
“[The power] is still causing problems,” ACUS administrator John Pearson said. “Some of our redundant systems are not working properly and therefore we can’t basically provide a service for the university.”
Not only does the GAB house the ACUS, but also has labs, classrooms, a coffee shop and administrative offices that need to be operable on a daily basis.
“We basically had to change our daily operations to wait for the redundant systems to come back and be more reliable,” Pearson said. “We’re still operating but we basically had a work-around we had to implement.”
The generator on the north side failed last semester and, although it was repaired, is once again the cause for the portable generator housed outside the GAB.
“I guess what’s upsetting is that somebody didn’t do their job,” Pearson said. “We were supposed to have a nice generator that was working great and was supposed to have battery backups that worked really well, and for whatever reason those didn’t come through for us.”
Pearson said apart from the portable generator being an eyesore, it provided functionality to the GAB and he’s glad there is a power source available, should there be an outage.
Parts for the permanent generator at the GAB have been ordered and are set to arrive in two to four weeks. Once the parts are there it will take three to five days to install and operations should continue.
Featured Image: Students walk by the Cummins generator located outside the northwest side of the General Academic Building. Dylan Nadwodny | Staff Photographer
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