The biggest generator I have ever been around was a Cooper-Bessemer diesel generator(s) at the Cooper Nuclear Power Plant near Brownsville, NE. They had two of them for emergency generation during a SCRAM (plant shutdown). They were V-16's that turned 240rpm at full power and generated 4MW each which was enough to power to run cooling pumps until the switch gear could bring power (about 16MW's) into the plant instead of out. They came to full power almost instantly and only ran a couple minutes.
I was working for a company that was doing instrument calibrations/checkout for start-up of the plant, this was in 1972. I remember one time we had just came to work and when we pulled into the parking lot the circuit breakers were blowing in the switch yard. We went right up to the control room to see what was going on. The plant just had a SCRAM (not at full power). There was a guy standing back in the room and was shaking like a leaf. I asked him what had him so shook up, he said he was in the generator room wiping oil under the diesel engines when they lit off. They had compressed air starters so you can imagine the noise they made when they started. Scared the bejesus out of him, as it would anyone to have a engine 20' long start up right on top of them. You occasionally hear a semi have an air starter and some locomotives have air starters.
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