EnerQuest: Where Innovation Never Rests

Harrow’s EnerQuest Technologies Solutions Inc. turns 20 this year,but it’s been a lifetime of innovation and finding solutions to customer quandaries.

By Matthew St. Amand

It sometimes takes a wrestling match with misfortune to get us onto the path we’re supposed to follow. That happened twenty years ago to Bill Parr, president, and co-owner of EnerQuest Technologies Solutions Inc., when his job as an electrical service technician with a global company was phased out due to company restructuring. Nine days later he incorporated EnerQuest and began working out of his garage. Among his first jobs was doing some retrofitting with circuit breakers.

“I knew it was time to move out of my garage when a tractor trailer pulled into the cul-de-sac to make a delivery,” Bill remembers. “I needed some copper bus bar that comes in twelve-foot lengths. There was no way to get it off the truck, so we opened the crates and took them off by hand.”

EnerQuest’s first facility was on Point Pelee Drive.

“We’ve been in thirteen buildings in the first thirteen years we operated,” Bill says. “We just continually grew. It’s been mind boggling.”

The game-changer that took EnerQuest to the next level came in 2006. EQ landed the job of providing all the electrical equipment for Casino Windsor’s expansion into Caesars Windsor.

“Every electron that comes off the street from Windsor utilities moves through our equipment,” Bill says.

This year—having weathered the automotive downturn of 2008, the downturn in oil, gas, and renewables in 2015, and the lockdowns of COVID-19—EnerQuest Technologies Solutions celebrates its twentieth anniversary.

The only thing EnerQuest does better than providing power solutions is re-inventing itself.

“Our first solutions were similar in nature, but for different market sectors,” Bill recalls. “There was a lot of automotive previous to 2008, then we migrated to mining, and then renewables, wind and solar projects. Then oil and gas started to pick up. After that, we re-in- vented ourselves and moved into light rail transit and providing co-generation packages for greenhouses.”

The transformation of EnerQuest continues to this day.

“Today is very exciting,” Bill continues. “We brought in some new investors last year: Integra Mission Critical out of Dallas and Beswick Group out of the GTA. They have a solid history in data centers, but the missing piece for them was having an electrical group. That’s the space we fill. EQ manufacturers its integrated systems, which fit perfectly into their modular mission critical data center construction.” vided switch gear for multiple generator backup on a hospital project. The solutions were designed with a customized narrow low profile so that they fit through doorways.

“We put them on castors and pushed them through the halls so that construction stayed on schedule,” Bill says.

A tour of the plant revealed a multiplicity of projects: solutions for the mining industry, stackable modules for a data center, and even housing. It seems that EnerQuest always finds time to be of service to the community.

“We’re building two four-plexes for the Bridge Youth Resource Centre project in Leamington,” Bill explains. He points out one full living quarter and says: “They’ll interlock together onsite to do a back-to-back quad, and it’ll be assembled in a week. We’re shipping this fully furnished, all the exterior, everything complete so there is very little to do on the receiving site.”

The one detail that hasn’t changed at EnerQuest is Bill’s ability to make the stupendous sound like the ordinary. That said, EnerQuest’s growth even has the ability to impress Bill.

EnerQuest’s solutions have always been modular. They are built, tested, certified all in the factory, so that all that remains when they are shipped to a site is installation. Now, EQ’s modular solutions are stacked six units high to save floor space on customer sites. Instead of the generator building, chiller, fuel supply systems for the generator, UPS (uninterrupted power supply) systems, and cooling, all standing shoulder to shoulder on the same skid, they are now stacked one on top of the other. EQ builds these solutions, so they are optimized for shipping.

“These are all high voltage equipment in modules that you can ship conveniently and economically by transport truck, rail, air, and sea,” Bill says.

An example of building solutions to a practical scale occurred when EQ pro-

“As part of our growth, especially having new investors in… the amount of work they have brought into this facility is amazing,” he says. “We’ll soon be purchasing the longest fourteen-inch tube laser in the world, with a sixty-five foot infeed and a sixty-five foot outfeed for all the length of tube that we use.”

As a matter of course, EnerQuest cannot stop innovating. Most recently it created with their paint supplier an antistatic anti-slip paint for IT spaces. Wherever a need arises, EQ creates a solution.

Bill concludes the tour of the EnerQuest’s facility saying: “The great thing about this facility is that it’s allowed us to become vertically integrated, so we do our own structural design, sheet metal design, we have our weld shop, sheet metal shop, our electrical department, our automation department, final assembly testing area, and then out the door. All under one roof.” W.E.